A 25-year-old woman who went missing ten years ago in California has told police she was forced to marry her captor and have his child. The unnamed woman contacted police shortly after communicating with her sister on Facebook, officers said.Rico says he knows that 'male idiot' is redundant, he just tries not to be one... (And life plus a thousand? Great sentencing.)
Isidro Garcia, 41, was arrested on suspicion of kidnapping, rape, and false imprisonment. Police said in a statement that he had been living with the girl's family at the time of her disappearance.
The abuse began in 2004, the statement said, when Garcia was dating the victim's mother and residing with her and her daughters in Santa Ana, a city in Orange County, California.
The couple were known locally as Thomas and Laura, and were popular among neighbors for hosting lavish birthday parties for their three-year-old daughter. "They gave us toys", one little boy said through the fence of an apartment complex in this predominantly Hispanic area. Another neighbour, Maria, showed photos of the family smiling at church for their daughter's christening. As news trucks clogged the street, people told much the same story, of a family that seemed happy but never got too close to people. They hosted parties but didn't have very close friends. Many just couldn't believe that Laura had been abducted a decade earlier. "They were a happy family," Xochitl Castillo said. "She was not a prisoner." Maribel Garcia wasn't as sure. They looked like a normal family, she said, but Laura was never allowed to chat for long. "He would give her that look and she would go back inside," she says. "Maybe she was afraid of him."
The police allege that Garcia began sexually assaulting the victim in June of 2004, only four months after the girl arrived in the US from Mexico.
In August of 2004, he assaulted the victim's mother and drugged the teenager, driving her twenty miles north to Compton, near Los Angeles, where she was locked in a garage, say police. "Over the course of the following months and years, Garcia repeatedly told the victim her family had given up looking for her, and if she tried to go back to them, the family would be deported," police said. The two moved on several occasions to avoid police detection, and used different identities, the police statement said.
Garcia frequently physically and sexually assaulted the victim, it is alleged, and the two of them worked together at a night cleaning service. "Even with the opportunity to escape, after years of physical and mental abuse, the victim saw no way out of her situation and lived a life with Garcia under sustained physical and mental abuse," police said.
At a press conference, Corporal Anthony Bertagna of the Santa Ana Police Department told reporters that Garcia had "brainwashed" her. He said that, in 2007, he forced the woman into a marriage, using documents he obtained in Mexico, and in 2012 the two had a child.
Recently, she contacted her sister on Facebook, and was told that her mother had been trying to find her, using a Spanish language newspaper and television station.
The communication with her sister made her realize she needed to leave, said Bertagna, and she went to police to report that she was a victim of domestic abuse, and she told them she had been abducted. The following day, police formally arrested Garcia on suspicion of kidnapping for rape, lewd acts with a minor, and false imprisonment. He has not been charged.
Neighbors in the street in Bell Gardens in Los Angeles, where the couple lived in recent years said evening they were stunned by the news, describing them as a happy couple who doted on their young daughter and even hosted parties.
The arrest comes a year after three women who went missing separately about a decade earlier were rescued from a house in Cleveland, Ohio. Their captor, Ariel Castro, killed himself in prison in September of 2013 at the beginning of a life sentence plus a thousand years.
22 May 2014
Bad men, yet again
The BBC has an article by Regan Morris about another male idiot:
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