Lackland trainer handed 4 years in rape

A shackled Staff Sgt. Eddy Soto (center) is escorted out of a building at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland after being found guilty. A shackled Staff Sgt. Eddy Soto (center) is escorted out of a building at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland after being found guilty. Photo: MARVIN PFEIFFER, Express-News Photo: MARVIN PFEIFFER, Express-News Image 1 of / 63 Caption Close Lackland trainer handed 4 years in rape 1 / 63 Back to Gallery

An Air Force boot camp instructor got four years in prison and a dishonorable discharge Saturday after being found guilty of raping an airman he'd led in basic training.

Staff Sgt. Eddy Soto appeared stunned when Lt. Col. Matthew Van Dalen pronounced the verdict.

In court after a recess, he stood before the judge and nervously recited the Lord's Prayer.

He then said, “Your honor, please be merciful on me.”

Soto, 30, is only the second trainer at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland to be convicted of rape since trials began last spring in the growing instructor misconduct scandal.

Staff Sgt. Luis Walker was given 20 years in July.

Soto faced as much as life without parole for the rape, one of six charges and eight specifications of misconduct.

Prosecutors asked for 12 to 15 years, while defense attorney Maj. Willie Babor sought a sentence “that does not sacrifice the remainder of his life.”

Soto pleaded guilty to five charges, and admitted to having sex with two women, one an airman in technical school and another who'd come to see her husband graduate from basic training.

A married father with two daughters, he also pleaded guilty to adultery but denied raping a woman, identified as Airman 2, who had been in his basic training flight.

Now 29 and assigned to a base in California, she said she came forward to protect other women from being victimized.

“I just want to tell the Air Force if they can do something in basic training they won't have victims like me later on,” she said before leaving the stand.

So far, 33 instructors have fallen under investigation, and 63 airmen in basic and technical training are listed as victims in a scandal that's become the worst in Air Force history. The victims include four men.

Prosecutors accused Soto of raping Airman 2 after she flew from California to San Antonio to see him in fall 2010, saying she firmly told him that she did not want to have sex.

The defense said she wanted a relationship, and that she made two more trips to San Antonio to see him. Babor said she realized he was texting other women while on her third trip here and demanded he make a choice.

“'You're a player,'” Babor, the defense attorney, summed up Airman 2's ultimatum in closing arguments. “'If you don't stop, I'm changing my tickets and going home.'”

The defense said Soto called her bluff and that she stayed with him as planned, having what both said was consensual sex before going home.

A key question in the trial, the 10th in less than a year to see a Lackland basic training instructor charged with sexual misconduct, is whether she had been raped and later sexually assaulted on one occasion, or if she claimed to be a victim out of her sense of shame.

The case pivoted on the point in part because she's Vietnamese.

Prosecutors brought in one expert, Dr. Rita Chung, a George Mason University professor of cross-cultural studies, to help explain the airman's reaction when Soto first had sex with her.

That was in October 2010, after she flew from California to Texas.

Prosecutors said the woman brushed off Soto's efforts to kiss her after he picked her up at San Antonio International Airport. They said he physically overpowered her when they were in the bedroom of his home, despite her efforts to push him off.

“'I'm not ready for sex,'” Capt. Matthew Neil, a prosecutor, described the encounter. “Words spoken by a woman who didn't want to have sex.”

Babor, the defense attorney, worked to punch holes in that claim, using the woman's statements and the Vietnamese cultural expert, Chung, to make his points. He also said the woman's memory got fuzzy under cross-examination.

Evidence showed Airman 2 continued sleeping with Soto after the initial sexual encounter, and twice more returned to San Antonio through the following spring.

Babor wondered why she'd continue to see her rapist and asked the judge, who was asked to decide the case, to make sense of 4,190 text messages the couple exchanged over about six months, including 2,459 sent by Airman 2. There also were 655 phone calls between the two.

Prosecutors insisted the woman did not want to have sex in their first visit, but tried to build a relationship with Soto because she was shamed as a result of the rape.

Neil, the lead prosecutor, said she saw Soto as a trusted mentor and blamed herself for buying the plane ticket and for the rape itself.

As a woman who grew up in Vietnam until she was 21, she was strongly influenced by her country's culture and was “trying to save face” by working to develop a relationship with Soto, Neil said.

Babor countered that the woman feared her boyfriend's reaction if he got wind of her relationship with Soto.

She and the boyfriend have since married.

In tearful testimony during the sentencing phase, Airman 2 said she could not discuss the rape with her parents, who were proud of her for serving in the Air Force, or with her husband.

“I can't even tell you what happened, because I just keep it to myself,” she said.