Repeat flasher busted on courthouse steps

SANTA MARIA — Alvaro Barajas-Chavez is having problems with self-control.

The 25-year-old made a Santa Barbara Superior Court appearance in Santa Maria where he submitted a not-guilty plea to charges of indecent exposure stemming from a January arrest in Orcutt.

The evidence in that case indicated that Barajas-Chavez had exposed himself to a pair of 15-year-old girls as he repeatedly drove past them in his SUV.

As Barajas-Chavez was making his not guilty plea Monday, further investigation on the case was contemporaneously ongoing. Just as the defendant was released pending a trial date, sheriff’s investigators realized that a very similar case was reported to have just taken place two days prior in Goleta, just north of Santa Barbara city limits.

The reports of that incident indicated that at approximately 5:30 p.m. on May 1, a man matching Barajas-Chavez’s description driving an SUV drove past two 14-year-old females who were riding a tandem bicycle on a residential street. Cruising past the girls, Barajas-Chavez was reported by sheriff’s spokesman Sgt. Drew Sugars to have “lifted his hips and exposed himself” to the cyclists.

Just moments later, the girls noted that the SUV was following them again. Sugars said the suspect was alleged to have “removed his shirt and exposed himself in the same manner as he drove past the girls again.”

As Barajaz-Chavez was exiting the Santa Maria Division Courthouse, he was confronted by sheriff’s deputies and immediately re-arrested on additional charges of indecent exposure relating to the Goleta incident.

Alvaro Barajas Chavez