‘I was a child’: How a bomb threat revealed alleged sex abuse scandal at East Bay juvenile hall

OAKLAND — John Doe was a prisoner in the California Youth Authority, upset, angry, and obsessed with the woman who’d allegedly groomed and molested him since he was 13, while she worked as an officer at the Alameda County Juvenile Hall that he once called home.

So the boy took drastic action. From his cell, in 2008, he penned a letter full of lies, claiming he’d hidden live grenades in her home and promising that if she stopped ignoring him he’d tell her where they were. When the letter was intercepted by jail staff, it led to a bomb squad raid in Hayward.

Police did not find any explosives, but one detective discovered something damning: pictures of the child — shirtless and raising a middle finger toward the camera — stacked on the woman’s bedroom dresser, according to court records.

Now, 18 years later, that fateful day has taken on a huge significance amid allegations that the officer, 53-year-old Nicole Perales, was sexually abusing incarcerated boys in the San Leandro juvenile hall during the early 2000s. Perales has been charged with 10 felony counts alleging she molested Doe, now a man in his 30s, during his teen years. Doe sued the county in 2024; earlier this month, two other boys filed a second lawsuit accusing Perales of grooming and abusing them.

On the stand during Perales’ January preliminary hearing, Doe described the alleged scandal in full. He laid out painstaking details of childhood, from the alleged “grooming” he experienced, to the anger and pain from being “in love” with a woman he now views as a child molester, to his early adult years, when he committed a horrifying act of child rape and attempted murder that virtually guarantees he will live out the rest of his life and die in prison.

Police say there is one major point that they’ve used to verify Doe’s allegations: He was able to accurately describe a scar near Perales’ genitals, a mark that she denied to police she’d ever discussed with or shown to Doe.

Perales has pleaded not guilty and her attorney argued in court that the case is “as thin as it can get,” calling Doe’s honesty into question. Perales has been out on $55,000 bail since the charges were filed in 2023, and isn’t due in court again for three months, records show.

Perales’ defense attorney declined to comment when reached by the Bay Area News Group.

Doe testified at the preliminary hearing about authoring the two letters that changed everything. One was the 2008 bomb threat hoax, which piqued detectives’ suspicions but resulted in no charges against Perales. The second, penned in 2022, was a letter to Alameda County, detailing the alleged abuse, which was forwarded to the Sheriff’s special victims unit.

He came forward, he said, because he has grown sick of suffering in silence.

“I was a child,” Doe said from the witness stand. “Since I been 13, I’ve been carrying the weight of an adult on my shoulders.”

Doe’s childhood, described in court records and his own testimony, lacked all of the things most kids take for granted. He had no stable home, and almost no formal education. Starting around age 9, he was bounced around between foster homes, boys ranches, and eventually juvenile jails, where at age 13 he met Perales. He said she displayed “favoritism” toward him, like bringing homemade cookies, letting him out of his cell when others were locked up, or asking him to memorize her phone number for when he was released back to foster care.

Then one day, she showed up to his foster home to take him clothes shopping, then said she needed to stop by her Hayward apartment to use the restroom, he testified. She exited her bathroom wearing a robe, grabbed his arm, and told him to perform a sex act on her, he said.

“I just froze. I didn’t know what was going on. I just did it,” he testified. Over time, he said he’d come to live at the home, going there hundreds of times, sleeping in her bed, and continuing the alleged sex abuse after he was re-arrested for a new offense. Sometimes he’d run away from foster care and stay with her despite having an active arrest warrant, he testified. Once, to celebrate his 14th birthday, he testified, they went to a hotel along the coast, drank Hennessy, walked along the beach, and “had sex.

“I wanted to be with her forever,” he said. “I was in love with her; and she said we couldn’t really do that because of my age.”

After Doe was transferred to a California Youth Authority, she stopped talking to him. So he wrote the letter about the grenades, hoping to coerce her into speaking. Instead, it led to police raids; the bomb squad came to her home and to her mother’s and shot her mother’s pit bull, he testified.

Court records describe the bomb squad operation, but the actual files — including the stack of photographs of Doe that were allegedly found in Perales’ bedroom, and the letter that first brought the bomb squad — have all been “purged,” meaning they were destroyed, police reported. Detectives say they grew suspicious, not just of the photos but also her letters. One was from Doe and indicated they were romantic partners. Another was a Valentine’s Day card from a boy who’d been at the juvenile hall that read, “honey we’re good together and we’re together for good.” Another note, from a incarcerated boy, referred to “Nikki” as his “sweetheart,” police said in court filings.

At the time, Perales denied anything more than a professional relationship with Doe; without Doe’s cooperation, the investigation went nowhere. In 2022, when police confronted her a second time, she once again denied the allegations and denied having a scar like the one that Doe described.

But the Sheriff’s detectives had a surprise — they’d brought along an extremely unusual search warrant, having garnered a judge’s permission to “inspect” and even photograph Perales’ genitals. They showed her the warrant and collected the evidence, which prosecutors now say bolsters’ Doe’s credibility.

“I don’t know what it feels like to be a kid. That’s something I don’t even want a kid to have to go through,” Doe testified.

In the mid-2010s, Doe himself robbed a child of her innocence in traumatizing and brutal fashion. He and another man broke into a 16-year-old girl’s home, tied up her father and a boy, then took turns raping her before setting the house on fire. The trio escaped and survived. Doe claimed a complete memory lapse of the incident but said he pleaded guilty when DNA confirmed he had done it. The sentence carries life with no chance for parole.

The two new alleged victims include a relative of Doe who was incarcerated during the 2000s, and a second man who is serving a life sentence for murder, court records show. Both say that Perales groomed and sexually abused them inside the facility in a similar fashion as Doe. Authorities say they’ve interviewed at least one of the victim as recently as June, but no new charges have been filed thus far.