Boy accuses man of sexual battery

FORT WALTON BEACH — A 15-year-old boy says a 39-year-old man raped him in a warehouse on Skipper Avenue, according to the Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office.

      Christopher Joseph Mars, now 40, a truck driver from Santa Rosa Beach, is charged with felony sexual battery. He was arrested last week after Emerald Coast Crime Stoppers listed him as a fugitive.

      The boy told lawmen Mars asked him if he wanted to make some extra money refurbishing mailboxes, according to the arrest report.

      He agreed, and Mars picked him up from his workplace one night at about 8 p.m. and took him to 926 Skipper Avenue, investigators say.

      There, Mars took the boy to a room with a cot and a bed and told him to take off his clothes or he wouldn’t take him home. Then he began to perform sex acts on the boy and asked the boy to perform acts on him, according to the report.

      At the end, the boy said Mars told him “That was an easy $100,” a deputy wrote.

      The boy said he went back to the warehouse two days later and scraped stickers off several mailboxes without incident. Two weeks later, he said Mars offered to buy him school clothes and a car.

      The boy’s mother said the boy was “acting weird” in October before he told her he’d “been raped” by Mars. He said it happened “the Friday after school let out for the summer,” according to the report.

      Phone calls to Mars’ listed number and the number for 926 Skipper Avenue were unanswered Thursday.

      Mars was charged April 25 and is in the county jail on $100,000 bond, a jail officer said. He is scheduled to appear in court May 20.