By Andy Sevilla
A 20-year-old San Marcos man is accused of sexually assaulting a 12-year-old Kyle girl after meeting her on a social networking site, according to recent jail records and court documents.
Michael Casey Batton was arrested June 26 and charged with three counts of aggravated sexual assault of a child, stemming from a police investigation into at least three alleged encounters between the suspect and the girl, court documents state.
The alleged child victim told investigators she first met Batton on the social networking site Meetme.com in 2013. The child said she and Batton communicated on the website and by phone after exchanging numbers, though the two didn’t meet in person until December of that year, sometime before Christmas, court documents state.
The social site Meetme is similar to Facebook or MySpace, where people can go online and make new friends. However, Meetme also provides users with a list of people who are online and uses GPS to identify who is nearby and how far away they are.
According to the Meetme website, a user must be at least 13 years old and a freshman in high school.
The alleged sexual assault victim was 12 years old.
The child told investigators she sneaked out of her Kyle home after everyone in the residence was asleep and met Batton at a nearby gas station in December. The child said she and Batton went to a park near Wallace Middle School before driving to Walgreens at the intersection of FM 2770 and FM 150, court documents state.
That’s where the two were talking in Batton’s car and later got into the back seat of his grey four-door passenger car. The child told investigators Batton “got on top of her and she just kind of stayed there and didn’t know what to do,” court documents state.
The two engaged in sexual activity that night, according to the probable cause affidavit used to secure an arrest warrant for Batton, but the child told investigators the suspect stopped when she told him she needed to return home.
The child said the two engaged in sexual activity on three separate occasions in 2013, with the first occurring just before Christmas, and the subsequent dates sometime right after Christmas and on New Year’s Eve, court documents state.
According to the child, Batton told her he was moving to North Dakota to help care for his mother.
A Meetme.com profile under the name Michael Batton, who identified himself as a 20-year-old man from San Marcos, was last logged into around June 18, according to the site. The pictures on the user’s profile appear to be the same man as Batton’s Hays County jail mug shot.
Authorities first learned of the alleged sexual encounters between the 12-year-old girl and Batton after a classmate of the alleged child victim approached a Hays County Sheriff’s deputy to report the sexual relationship, court documents state.
Batton, who was being held under $75,000 bail, was released from the Hays County jail hours after being arrested on the three first-degree felony sexual assault charges, jail records show.
Two days before Batton was arrested, Meetme touted a new milestone in user-to-user chats on their website and mobile apps.
The social networking site announced in a news release June 24 that it set a new daily record for the number of user-to-user chats sent a day prior. For the first time in Meetme’s history, more than 15 million chats were sent on a single day, the company said in the release.
