No, this is not another story about Ariel Castro, this is a story about Isidro Garcia, who also kidnapped his victim, raped and impregnated her, and held captive for 10 years.
Isidro Garcia was arrested Tuesday after his alleged victim reached out to her sister on Facebook and revealed how she been held hostage in a relationship with the 41-year-old man and had given birth to his child during the decade she vanished.
Santa Ana police say the girl’s mother reported her missing in August 2004. The mother told police her daughter went missing, along with her live-in boyfriend, Garcia, after a domestic violence incident.
Detectives say the mother suspected Garcia was sexually abusing her daughter.
A former neighbor in the sprawling Villa del Sol apartment complex recalled speaking with the missing girl’s mother shortly before the alleged kidnapping.
“I spoke to her mom about God,” Silvia Suarez, 54, told The Times in Spanish. “She said she was having problems with her partner. She believed he was romancing her daughter.”
The mother also suspected that her partner was having a sexual relationship with her daughter and that they were making plans to leave together.
Araceli Ochoa, a leasing agent for the well-kept complex over more than 500 units, remembered speaking to the girl’s mother after the girl went missing.
She said the mother came to her office and was deeply worried and stressed.
“She couldn’t understand how her daughter could leave,” Ochoa said in Spanish. She also expressed relief that she had been located by police. “I am very excited that they found her but it’s still a tragedy that she has to live with every day now,” Ochoa said. “Each day with him probably felt like 100 years to her.”
The victim, now 25, revealed to authorities Tuesday how she was abducted in June 2004, when she was living with her mother and sisters in Santa Ana.
