El Paso police arrested City Council candidate Arturo Alluin on suspicion of domestic violence in 2022, according to police records obtained by El Paso Matters.
A judge issued a warrant for Alluin’s arrest on a Class A misdemeanor charge on Aug. 16, 2021, after he got into a fight earlier that night with his then-girlfriend at Hotel Paso del Norte, according to El Paso Police Department records. El Paso Matters obtained the records from the city of El Paso under the Texas Public Information Act.
Alluin allegedly choked his girlfriend and pushed her against a bathroom wall, causing her to hit her head and fall to the floor, according to the police affidavit in the incident report and a video of the victim’s statement to the police. He also slapped her multiple times in the face, the report alleges.
“It was a very traumatic experience,” the woman told El Paso Matters in a phone interview. She asked that she not be identified for fear of retaliation. “He gets very aggressive when he’s drunk.”
No court records exist of the case ever going to trial. Texas law allows people accused of crimes to seek to have court and law enforcement records destroyed if they are acquitted of a criminal charge, or if the charge is dismissed.
Alluin repeatedly declined an interview with El Paso Matters to respond to questions about the arrest and allegations. He claimed in text messages the case was subject to a judge’s expunction order this year and should not have been released. He declined to provide El Paso Matters a copy of any judicial orders related to the case.
Expunction orders can be directed to government agencies that maintain criminal records, including the El Paso Police Department. But city officials say they have no record of such an order in Alluin’s case.
“EPPD has confirmed that it does not have an expunction order on file related to this case,” city spokesperson Laura Cruz-Acosta said. “We can also confirm that El Paso Matters submitted a public information request for records related to this matter through the city’s public information request process. The request was reviewed and EPPD provided the responsive public records through that process.”
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Alluin is running in the November election to represent District 8, which spans South-Central El Paso, Downtown and part of the Westside. The first-time candidate is challenging incumbent city Rep. Chris Canales, as well as candidates Matthew Guzman, Laura Ochoa-Todd and Johnny J. Gonzalez.
El Paso Matters checked criminal court records and requested El Paso police reports filed in the last 10 years for all the District 8 candidates. No reports with criminal allegations against any of the other four candidates were produced. Under Texas Election Code, a criminal record does not disqualify someone from running for office unless they are convicted of an unpardoned felony.
The El Paso Municipal Police Officers Association endorsed Alluin, according to an Aug. 27 post on Alluin’s campaign Instagram page. The police union did not respond to requests for comment.
Alluin, 35, owns several restaurants, including the Melting Pot, Sushiitto and Meduza, now rebranded as Mykonos Mediterranean Steakhouse. County records also show he has a business registration for cocktail bar Kyoshi Sound House, though Alluin said in July he does not own that business.
His ex-girlfriend, who no longer lives in El Paso, said she and Alluin began a relationship when she worked as a hostess at his restaurant the Melting Pot at The Fountains at Farah in 2019.
At the time of the hotel incident in 2021, Alluin was 30 and the woman was 21.
The woman alleged this was not the first time their arguments had turned physical, the police officer noted in the incident report. Alluin declined to comment on the allegation of his past assaults.
Alluin turned himself in to El Paso police June 28, 2022, nearly a year after the arrest warrant was issued, according to the arrest report. He was booked into the El Paso County Detention Center with a bond set at $2,500.
It’s unclear why he was not arrested sooner. The incident report states an officer tried unsuccessfully to contact Alluin by phone the same day of the family violence call.
Did Alluin petition for his criminal case records to be destroyed?
Under Texas law, expunction orders can’t be reviewed by the general public or shared by government agencies, although the person who requested the order can provide them. The Sheriff’s Office, District Attorney’s Office and County Clerk’s Office said they no longer have records related to Alluin, although police reports obtained by El Paso Matters indicate that those offices had such records in 2022. The lack of records may indicate they received expunction orders.
His booking does not appear in jail records. A spokesperson for the Sheriff’s Office said they are “unable to release any information regarding this matter.”
A case presentation by a police officer for the District Attorney’s Office described the alleged offense as assault causing bodily injury to a family member, a Class A misdemeanor. An administrator with the DA’s office said its “current records” do not reflect a case number for Alluin and did not respond to questions about if, when and how charges were dismissed.
County Clerk Delia Briones, whose office oversees court records for misdemeanor charges, said her office has a list of law-enforcement agencies who are notified electronically any time someone petitions for an expunction, and again when the petition is granted or denied. The list includes the El Paso Police Department, which said it has no such record of an expunction order involving the assault allegations against Alluin.
The County Clerk’s Office previously listed a misdemeanor family violence charge against Alluin in online records. That record is no longer available, and an employee at the clerk’s office told El Paso Matters they don’t have records for the case number that online records previously show was assigned to Alluin.
Expunction order requests are heard by district court judges, and agencies with responsive records are required to send those to the judge or destroy them if returning isn’t practical. The law says the District Clerk’s Office must destroy the records on the first anniversary of the expunction order, unless the petitioner asked that they be returned to them.
‘The partner I loved at the time had assaulted me’
“I’ve been quiet for so long,” Alluin’s former girlfriend said in a phone interview with El Paso Matters.
She alleged that on a few different occasions, Alluin slapped her after he got drunk at bars in the Cincinnati Entertainment District.
The woman said that looking back, she views dating her employer as unprofessional. But she was young and in love, not mature enough to realize it was an unhealthy relationship, the woman said. They had an intense, toxic, on-and-off-again relationship from 2019 to 2022, she said.
The couple were together for about a year-and-a-half before the hotel incident in August 2021, according to her video statement to the police. The woman told El Paso Matters that after the altercation, she drove to her family’s house, informed her family what happened and called the police to report the incident.
She and Alluin had planned to spend the night at Hotel Paso del Norte in Downtown El Paso. They were having drinks at one of the hotel’s bars when Alluin accused her of cheating on him and talking to an ex-boyfriend, according to her video statement to police and an incident report.
The argument was getting heated and they moved to a family restroom because she wanted privacy, the woman told El Paso Matters. There, Alluin escalated the altercation into violence – scratching, slapping and choking, she alleged.
Alluin slammed her against the bathroom wall, causing a burst of pain in the back of her head, she said. She tried to push him away, but he started slapping her on both sides of the face, the incident report states.
“He just started yelling at me, insulting me, and then he slapped me,” she told a police officer in her video statement. “And before he slapped me he choked me, and then he slapped me.”
Her shoes had fallen off at some point and she fled the bathroom with them in her hands, she told El Paso Matters.
“Before I tried to run from him, he kept telling me, ‘You are not going to tell anyone.’ Like, ‘If you tell anyone, nobody’s going to do anything about it,’” she told a police officer in the video statement. “And he was just very aggressive about it.”
In response to police questioning, the woman said she did not threaten or assault Alluin prior to him assaulting her, the video shows. No one witnessed the assault, she told the officer.
The police officer who took her statement observed redness to both sides of her face, a bruise on her right calf and a scratch to the top of her right foot, according to the report. The police took photos of her injuries.
“Is this the first time that he assaulted you?” the officer asked in the video.
“No,” she responded.
She told the officer that earlier that year, Alluin slapped her inside his car and told her she wasn’t going anywhere. The next morning she woke up with a bruise on her cheek, she said.
The woman told the police she wanted to press charges, according to police records. Four days later, El Paso police noted the victim wanted to drop the charges, according to a report from the department’s victim services response team.
The state is not obligated to comply with a victim’s request to drop charges and can still proceed with a case, said Omar Carmona, a criminal defense attorney in El Paso. He does not represent Alluin or the woman. But the state may dismiss the case if it’s difficult to prove, such as in situations where the complaining witness does not appear at trial and if other witnesses or evidence is lacking, he said.
“That doesn’t mean nothing happened,” Carmona said.
“Cases have been dismissed that if witnesses had come forward, these cases could have been proven beyond a reasonable doubt,” he said.
The woman told El Paso Matters that Alluin pressured her to not proceed with charges and apologized for hurting her – as he had done after the previous times he had slapped her.
He “gaslit” her into not pursuing criminal charges, she said.
Alluin living in El Paso is part of the reason why she does not want to move back, she said.
“It’s been so long and now that a lot of it has resurfaced, it’s hard to hear,” she said. “The partner I loved at the time had assaulted me. I don’t even know how to put that into words. It brings a lot of PTSD back.”
She told El Paso Matters she’s speaking up now because after distance, therapy and time to heal, she’s ready to close that chapter of her life.
“If you do bad things in the world, that’s what you are going to receive,” she said. “Unfortunately, that’s what’s happening to him. I wish him nothing but a healthy and successful life.”
The post El Paso police arrested city rep candidate Arturo Alluin on suspicion of domestic violence in 2022. Alluin said the case was expunged this year appeared first on El Paso Matters.
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