A local man with a long history of police encounters and prior arrests — including a recent charge for allegedly forcibly kissing a 13-year-old girl — was arrested again last week on new sexual assault allegations in Mattituck.
Noe Pacheco, 39, was taken into custody Tuesday night after allegedly groping two women inside the CVS on Main Road. According to authorities, he approached two female shoppers and grabbed their buttocks before fleeing the store. Southold police later located him in the nearby Mattituck Plaza parking lot and arrested him.
Pacheco, with no known address, was charged with two counts of forcible touching and one count of trespassing. Police said he had previously been ordered to stay off the Plaza property following prior complaints.
Due to the nature of the new charges, Pacheco was held on $10,000 bail and transferred to a Suffolk County jail cell. Forcible touching is a Class A misdemeanor in New York, punishable by up to a year in jail, though first offenders often receive probation.
Pacheco’s alleged actions are becoming a growing concern to local police. “It seems like things are escalating with him,” Southold Police Chief Steve Grattan said last week.
The latest arrest adds to what veteran law enforcement officials described as a troubling pattern. In April, Pacheco was charged with forcibly kissing a 13-year-old girl on her bicycle in front of the Handy Pantry in Mattituck — a case that remains pending.
In an interview last month with the North Fork Sun in the Adams St. parking lot about the Handy Pantry incident (listen to an excerpt below), Pacheco appeared coherent and answered a couple of questions.
Told that he’d been accused of forcibly kissing the young girl and asked what happened, he replied, “I don’t know. I was drunk. I’m so sorry for that.”
In a subsequent interview an hour later, he was too intoxicated to answer questions.
Pacheco is a familiar figure to local law enforcement. Over the past year alone, Southold police have arrested him seven times and issued nearly a dozen code violations, primarily for public drinking.
Pacheco has been banned from multiple Greenport locations, including the 7-Eleven, Mr. Roberts convenience store and his sister’s apartment on Front Street. He was ultimately banned from the entire building after witnesses reported he repeatedly showed up intoxicated, and on several occasions urinated and defecated in the hallways while waiting for his sister to come home.
“I’m a single mother,” said his sister, Nancy Pacheco, in an interview last month. “I’ve got to protect my family. He can’t come here anymore. He drinks too much.”
Urinating or defecating in public, disorderly conduct and loitering are all code violations that must be witnessed by law enforcement to be enforced. Public intoxication is neither a crime nor a code violation.
Sharon Sailor, owner of Front St. Station restaurant in Greenport, has encountered Pacheco firsthand. She donates food and clothing to a group of mostly Hispanic men who congregate in the Adams Street parking lot behind her restaurant — a group that includes Pacheco.
In an interview last month, Sailor recalled an incident when Pacheco tried to kiss her after she gave him some French fries. On another occasion, she said, he startled her by emerging from a trailer on her Mattituck property early one morning.
“It was like five in the morning, and I went to take the dog out and he jumped out of the trailer. I screamed and he ran,” she said.
Retired Southold Police Chief Martin Flatley said the department has long struggled to manage behavior among a core group of men who regularly gather in the Adams Street lots.
“We always dealt with a group of at least eight to a dozen males that were down there that, for the most part, had alcohol problems,” Flatley said in an interview last week. “You also had mental issues, and you were constantly chasing them. It was frustrating, because the most you could arrest them for or bring them in on was disorderly conduct or drinking alcohol in public — and you would spend more time arresting the person and processing them than the time that they’d spend in custody.”
He said the problem often worsens in the summer.
“It’s tough,” Flatley said. “We used to chase them from Adams St. and they’d go across to Mitchell Park. Then they’re hanging out in Mitchell Park, drinking, urinating in public in front of families that are walking by. So you chase them out of there, and they go back to Adams St.”
Veteran law enforcement officers say Pacheco’s behavior raises red flags. Tim Hardiman, a former commanding officer of the NYPD’s Brooklyn Special Victims Division, said he’s seen patterns like this escalate.
“They graduate from lower-level offenses to more serious ones,” Hardiman said.
In March, Pacheco was struck by a car and hospitalized after fleeing his sister’s apartment, allegedly intoxicated, according to public records. Last Fourth of July, Southold police found him on Greenport’s Fifth Street beach wearing only his underwear. In another incident last August, he was banned from Mitchell Park for a day after complaints that he was urinating at the beach.
Serious reporting job. Greenport needs to consider a court injuction to curb this sort of behavior. They work brilliantly, but definity raise some racial profiling issues. My guess is in this neo-facist age of America it might just work. See Long Beach CA. gang injunctions.