Texas man sentenced to life in prison for sexual exploitation of a 10-year-old child

TEXAS - A man who was convicted of sexually abusing a child for more than two years has been sentenced to life in federal prison.

Alex Mendoza, 26, of Lubbock, was indicted in May 2024 and pleaded guilty in August 2024 to enticement of a minor. He was sentenced on Friday.

The Crime

The backstory:

According to the U.S. Attorney's Office, Medoza first met the child and her mother at a party in 2020 when the child was 10. Mendoza was 22 at the time. Mendoza began messaging the child online and on Valentine's Day 2021, he began sexually abusing the child. The child was 11 and Mendoza was 23.

Soon after, court documents show, after he began abusing the child, he moved into the child's family home and lived there for two and a half years. Court documents say he had sex with the child approximately 30 to 50 times. He also sent messages to the child talking about sex and would remind the child to delete her messages.

In December 2023, he was caught sending messages to the child in the middle of the night from his bedroom down the hall. The child's mother confronted him about the messages, and he admitted to her mother to having an ongoing sexual relationship with the child.

New Details Emerge

Dig deeper:

At sentencing, Mendoza agreed to take a polygraph examination. He failed the polygraph. In his post-polygraph interview, Mendoza confessed to also sexually abusing a second child. A search warrant for Mendoza’s phone also revealed Mendoza to be in possession of 20 videos of child sexual abuse material. Mendoza admitted to law enforcement to receiving and distributing child sexual abuse material over the Internet.

What they're saying:

At sentencing, Judge Hendrix told Mendoza that he could not "capture with words the trauma you caused that will last for lifetimes." In imposing a life sentence, U.S. District Judge James Wesley Hendrix said: "I have to make a lot of difficult decisions. This is not one of them."