22 May 2014

US woman found a decade after kidnap

6:43 pm on 22 May 2014

A woman in southern California who disappeared 10 years ago when she was 15 has contacted police to say she was kidnapped and forced to marry her abductor.

Police in Santa Ana say the 41-year-old Isidro Garcia has been arrested on Tuesday on suspicion of kidnapping, rape and falsely imprisoning a minor.

Isidro Garcia had first dated the victim's mother before living with the family, police say.

Isidro Garcia had first dated the victim's mother before living with the family, police say. Photo: AFP

The unnamed woman went missing in 2004 and reported her abduction after finding her sister on the social networking site Facebook, the BBC reports.

Police said in a statement Mr Garcia had been living with the girl's family at the time of her disappearance.

The abuse began in 2004, the statement said, when Mr Garcia was dating the victim's mother and residing with her and her daughters in Santa Ana, a city in Orange County.

Police allege that Mr Garcia began sexually assaulting the victim in June of that year, only four months after the girl arrived in the United States from Mexico. In August, he assaulted the victim's mother and drugged the teenager, driving her 40km north to Compton, Los Angeles, where she was locked in a garage, say police.

"Over the course of the following months and years, Mr 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.

Mr Garcia frequently physically and sexually assaulted the victim, it is alleged, and the two of them worked together at a night cleaning service.

Corporal Anthony Bertagna of the Santa Ana Police Department told reporters that Mr 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 indeed been trying to find her, using a Spanish language newspaper and television station.

The communication with her sister made her realise she needed to leave, Mr Bertagna said, and on Monday 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 Mr Garcia. He has not been charged.

Neighbours in the street in Bell Gardens where the couple lived in recent years said say they are they 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 2013 at the beginning of a life sentence plus 1000 years.