‘Kidnapped’ US woman escapes from ‘decade of abuse’
A US woman is found alive, ten years after she was reported to have been abducted from her home. Police says she has suffered a decade-long ordeal of physical, mental and sexual abuse.
The woman, now 25, told police that she was kidnapped by a man who had been living wither her family in Santa Ana, southern California, in August 2004 – when she was 15 years old.
Police said that over the years the woman was sexually abused by her captor, and gave birth to his child in 2012.
Anthony Bertagna, Santa Ana Police spokesman, said: “My understanding is there was continued and repeated physical and sexual assaults. On two occasions she tried to escape, he caught her, he beat her for her efforts.”
A 41-year-old man, Isidro Garcia, has been arrested on suspicion of kidnapping, rape, lewd acts with a minor and false imprisonment, police said.
The woman contacted authorities on Tuesday after the woman found her sister on Facebook, police said.
She and Mr Garcia were reported missing by the woman’s mother ten years ago – but their whereabouts remained unknown for ten years. Mr Garcia was arrested on Tuesday at the home the pair had been living in – 20 miles from Santa Ana.
The woman alleges that Mr Garcia had begun abusing her two months before her abduction, and took her from the home after assaulting her mother.
Abuse
She told police that on the night of her abduction she was drugged by Mr Garcia, and locked in an garage in the nearby city of Compton overnight.
He moved with the teenager several times during the following months and years, police said, giving her false identification under a different name and telling her that family members had stopped looking for her.
Garcia frequently assaulted the woman physically and sexually over the next 10 years, forcing her into marriage in 2007 and later impregnating her, she told police.
Police have concluded that she and her family entered the US illegally, and that she could not speak English. It is claimed that Mr Garcia told the woman that if she found her family she would be deported to Mexico.
Mr Bertagna said: “She gets here in February, this happens to her six months later, she’s told by him her family doesn’t care, her family’s not looking for her. She’s got nowhere to go, she doesn’t speak English. So it’s not only mental, it’s physical abuse.”
Police said Garcia arranged for both of them to work at a night-time cleaning service so he could keep watch over her, and added that she saw no way to escape.
The escape by the woman comes a year after the escape of three Ohio women, who were abducted by Ariel Castro in Cleveland.
