Police in Huancayo, Peru, freed a suspect identified as 42-year-old Walter César Solís Calero this weekend after officials at a local girls’ school found him, dressed in the school’s uniform and hiding behind a sanitary mask, in a school bathroom carrying a mobile phone.
Solís’s arrest occurred on Thursday at the Rosa de América Institute, a public high school for girls. Prosecutors said that school surveillance video showed that Solís entered the school along with the rest of the students in the morning, carrying a backpack and blending into the crowd, and spent much of the day in the bathroom. When asked what he was doing in the school by teachers and other staff, Solís could reportedly not provide an answer, resulting in police action.
One report claimed that he later told police he had entered the school to film a video to post on the Chinese mobile app Tiktok.
An unnamed schoolgirl told the broadcaster TVPE that the school’s principal convened an assembly outside after Solís’s arrest and told the girls that he had been inside the school for a week before a teacher discovered him.
“When we were getting together, they told us that a gentleman had been inside the school for a week. For a week he was behind the bathroom because that was usually open but for a week it was closed,” the girl said. “It was noted that in a week, a very strange student was in there for a week, had come out of nowhere. Since they thought it was just another student who had transferred to the school, they didn’t do anything.”
“But today in the morning, a student tried to do something and she ran out and even broke the door running scared,” the girl said.
News of the arrest spread rapidly, resulting in a crowd of parents surrounding the school as police extracted Solís into custody and attempting, with some success, to beat him.
Prosecutor María Gutiérrez Fernández, who specializes in crimes against women, announced on Thursday that police had discovered “a person of the masculine sex dressed as a girl student, fully in uniform and wearing braided hair.”
“Upon becoming aware of these acts, we are taking appropriate action as immediately as possible to find evidence and elements of conviction that are necessary for us as a public ministry to take further action,” Gutiérrez said on Thursday.
Two days later, on Saturday, Solís left police custody on the grounds that authorities are only given 48 hours to keep a person in preventive detention without amassing evidence that the person committed a crime. The Peruvian newspaper El Comercio reported that authorities had sought to charge him with a sexual crime such as assault or child pornography. Searches of his home, electronic devices, and communications did not result in any evidence that could keep him behind bars.
A psychological evaluation, reports indicated, concluded that Solís had the mental maturity of an adolescent girl and carried himself as such.
El Comercio did note that police found a second school’s girls’ uniform in his home — matching early reports following Solís’s arrest that there were photos on his phone of him wearing other uniforms, suggesting that he had trespassed into other institutions — but this was apparently not enough to keep him home. Peruvian media reports did not explain why prosecutors had not charged Solís with trespassing or other non-sexual crimes, given video evidence of his unauthorized presence in the school.
El Comercio described local parents as disgusted with Solís’s release, “expressing fear that he would return to his behavior and endanger the integrity of the minors.”
Prior to Solís’s liberation, dozens of parents surrounded the local police station demanding that the government impose a long prison sentence on Solís.
A friend of Solís’s who wished to remain anonymous told the local Huanca York Times publication that Solís identifies as a woman and goes by the name “Thalía Solís.” The friend apparently shared the individual’s Tiktok profile, which Solís used to share dancing videos and promote his beautician industry. Solís specializes in hair removal and nail art.
@thaliasolis5
The friend said she was “not surprised” to hear of Solís in a schoolgirl uniform, but did insist that no evidence suggested that Solís had any sexual attraction to children or an interest in engaging in sexual assault at the school.
“I know that she [sic] didn’t go in [to the school] with bad intentions, but because the issue is this frustrated dream of not having finished her studies,” the friend said in an interview with the Huanca York Times. “So I know that dressing as a schoolgirl — that didn’t surprise me because she dressed however she wanted, whatever came to mind. What was on social media that she went in to rape or abuse the girls, I don’t know, and a bunch of things they are exaggerating because Thalía isn’t like that.”
“I understand the parents of families but once you see who it is about, who Thalía is, knowing her like I know her, I know that it wasn’t for this bad purpose of abusing the girls or photographing them,” the friend asserted.
Regional outlets reported that the parents told police their children now feared using the bathroom at school; in addition to demanding Solís’ imprisonment, the parents demanded the government provide psychological counseling to the girls at the school.
Follow Frances Martel on Facebook and Twitter.
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