City man sentenced to 4 years in 2019 sex assault of underage teens

MANCHESTER, NH — A city man, accused of raping three teenage girls who ran away from a River Road treatment center in search of alcohol in 2019, told a judge he took responsibility for what happened but wanted her to know he is a man of God, not a monster or predator.

Matthew Hugle, 27, formerly of 56 Ledgewood Drive, apologized for his actions but also maintained he “had no idea they were underage.  Taking advantage of young girls is not right. That’s not my style.”

He admitted he and Chasrick Heredia gave the girls – one age 17, and the others, 15 — alcohol.  But he said, the woman “told me she was 18.”  It would never have transpired, he said, had he known she was underage.

Judge Amy Messer, presiding in Hillsborough County Superior Court Northern District, told Hugle his statements were concerning to her. “It concerns me you don’t see anything wrong with your conduct,” she said.

Hugle told her he was taking responsibility but that there was no pre-meditation on his part.  She explained the charges didn’t say his conduct was pre-meditated.

She told him the three young women were very vulnerable and are victims of a crime.

Hugle apologized to the victims “for all their hurt” and said he was not trying to minimize his conduct.

Messer, in accepting his guilty pleas and imposing the negotiated sentence, said she was doing so to allow the women to get on with their lives.  They will not have to testify, there will be no appeal and the case will not continue to go on and on, she said.

Hugle pleaded guilty to three counts of being an accomplice to intentional contribution to the delinquency of a minor, for providing the teens with alcohol; one charge each of sexual assault and contempt of court, both misdemeanors; and two counts of second-degree assault, class B felonies.

Hugle was sentenced to 48 months in jail on the four misdemeanors and given a six-month concurrent sentence on the contempt of court count.

He was also given a 3 ½ to 7-year suspended sentence in the New Hampshire State Prison on one second-degree assault count and given the same sentence on the second charge, but which is to be served consecutively.

In total, Hugle was sentenced to four years with 1,001 days of pre-trial credit.  It means he will be jailed another 15 months and then released.  At that point, he will be on parole for five years and on the sexual offender registry for 10 years.

Before he was sentenced, two of the victims spoke as did two of their dads.  Prosecutor Shaylen Roberts read a statement prepared by the third father.

In their statements, they described how the girls were traumatized by the experience. Two of the teens resorted to self-harm, with one cutting herself 300 times and having to undergo surgery twice.

All underwent – and continue to undergo—extensive therapy that one dad said would probably bankrupt the family.  One teen received in-patient treatment at a therapeutic high school for two years, missing out on her prom and other high school traditions.

She told Hugle that at 15 and 16 they thought they were so cool.  But, as it turns out because of what happened on July 23, 2019, they are left with nothing but misery.

“I forgive you,” she said, explaining she has to in order to get on with her life.  “I forgive us both.”

Her father, however, had no thoughts of forgiveness.  Noting Hugle was the father of a daughter, he asked him how he would feel if it happened to his daughter.  He said he hoped when Hugle got out of jail that he violated parole, so that he would be sent to prison for a longer time.

Messer said that if he is the person he says he is, and not a predator, that will be revealed through the sexual offender treatment program and counseling he will undergo while incarcerated.

Heredia, Hugel’s co-defendant, was convicted after a trial of contributing to the delinquency of minors, falsifying physical evidence and witness tampering.

The jury acquitted Heredia, 26, of Manchester, of the most serious charges, five aggravated felonious sexual assault counts.

Heredia was accused of sexually assaulting two of the teens while Hugel was accused of assaulting all three.  The girls had walked away from Granite Pathways, a River Road treatment center that has since closed, which was housed in the same building as the John H. Sununu Youth Services Center.

The girls left that day and went to a convenience store where they were asking people to buy them alcohol.  Hugle agreed to buy it. He picked up his friend Heredia and drove the teens to the clubhouse at Colonial Village, where Heredia lived.  They gave the teens the malted liquor and then left to go to a club.

When they returned later that night, all three teens were drunk and they engaged in sex with them, recording their actions on a cell phone and then uploading the images to the internet.

The falsifying evidence charge accused Heredia of asking a friend to delete a recording of him having sex with one of the teens.  He was concerned he might be charged with manufacturing child pornography, according to court records.

After Hugel’s sentencing, one of the victim’s mothers was concerned that the judge didn’t continue to press him on his comments.

“I wished the judge would have dived back into his comments a little bit deeper to make sure he was expected to come to terms with the fact this is rape and it doesn’t matter where these girls were, if they were young girls wanting to go party and have fun,” she said. “He didn’t have consent to have sex with three girls and I don’t think he accepts responsibility for that.”

She said people should be aware that he is going to be back out on the street in a year.

“I think it’s important that other families know his face, know who he is and what he did because he’s going to be out there,” she said.

What also concerned her, she said, is that he minimized what he did.

He said they told him they were 18, but the mother said 18 isn’t old enough to buy alcohol. “Eighteen doesn’t mean he had consent to have sex with them and he did not,” she said.

She said the uploaded photos of the sexual assaults did not become part of the case because investigators couldn’t find the photographs.

“They took pictures and films and uploaded them and who knows where they are now and they have to live with that,” she said.  “Teenage girls and social media are a big deal in their minds and that never got factored into this because they never found the physical evidence.”

She also thinks legislators need to look into enacting laws requiring accused rapists to undergo HIV testing.

All three teens, she said, had to endure three months of taking HIV-preventative medications.

“They had to travel across state to infectious disease control and take meds that made them sick as precautionary measures to not get HIV,” she said. “That could have all been avoided if they could give HIV testing to accused rapists but the law protects accused rapists not having to go through that.  The way the law stands now, the victims have to endure being sick for three months, traveling across state and being reminded of what happened to them.  The law needs to change.”