A youth soccer coach has been hit with nine new charges after he was previously charged with murdering a 13-year-old boy and sexually assaulting two teenage boys.
Mario Edgardo Garcia-Aquino pleaded not guilty to eight new counts of sodomy of a person under 16 and one new count of oral copulation of a person under 16, according to ABC 7. The charges involved incidents with two surviving alleged victims.
Now that Garcia-Aquino, 44, has entered his plea, there will be a four-day hearing to determine if there is enough evidence to allow the case to go to trial over the new allegations.
Garcia-Aquino is currently in jail without bail until it’s officially decided if he’s going to stand trial. Additionally, it is up to prosecutors to eventually decide whether or not they will seek the death penalty against Garcia-Aquino.
He has been charged with the murder of Oscar “Omar” Hernandez on March 28, 2025. Garcia-Aquin’s murder charge stems from the “special circumstance allegation of murder during the commission or attempted commission of a lewd act with a child,” according to the outlet.
Garcia-Aquino was initially charged with one count of assault with the intent to commit a sexual offense and one count of lewd act on a child 14 or 15 years old. The second charge stemmed from an incident with a different teenage boy who was allegedly sexually assaulted December 10, 2022, at a home in Sylmar, which was where Garcia-Aquino lived at the time.
He was initially charged separately with a felony count of assault with the intent to commit a lewd act during an incident with a 16-year-old boy in Palmdale on February 22, 2024. However, the charge has since been combined with the murder case.
The nine new counts involve alleged crimes that took place between September 2022 and July 2023, which allegedly involved Hernandez.
Two days after Hernandez was traveling to Lancaster to see his soccer coach on March 28, 2025, he was reported missing and was later found dead in Oxnard.
Hernandez’s body was discovered on April 2, 2025, by the side of a road in Oxnard. However, authorities never publicly revealed his cause of death.
The district attorney said that “certain investigative techniques” were used to find the teen’s body, as well as to determine that Garcia-Aquin was the suspected killer.
Following Hernandez’s death, his family said that they were “devastated by the unimaginable loss” and “heartbroken that someone entrusted with his care could commit such a horrific act.”
Shortly after Garcia-Aquin was named a suspect, Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna told reporters that Garcia-Aquino worked as a youth travel soccer coach with the Hurricane Valley Boys Soccer Club. As part of the job, he worked with different age divisions in the Sylmar area.
Additionally, he had no reported criminal history before his first arrest.
The U.S. Department of Replica Luxury Handbagland Security issued a statement about Garcia-Aquin’s arrest, saying that “13-year-old Oscar Omar’ Hernandez was an innocent child who was exploited and killed by this depraved illegal alien who should have never been in this country.”
