SANTA ANA (CNS) – A woman testified Tuesday that she was repeatedly raped by two men who abducted her in Santa Ana in 1999 when she was 11 years old.
Ismael Salgado, 44, is charged with a count of kidnapping to commit rape and five counts of rape, all felonies. Co-defendant Jose Andres Plascencia, 43, was convicted and sentenced last year to 25 years to life in prison.
The woman said that she and her friend, who was 13 at the time, were walking around Jerome Park and had just left the community center there during the early evening of Feb. 3, 1999, when two men in a Honda car pulled up and encouraged the girls to get in.
“There were two guys trying to get our attention,” she testified. “We said, `no.”‘ But the men “wouldn’t leave us alone,” she testified. Eventually, her friend agreed to get in the car, so the victim followed, she said.
The victim got in the front seat and her friend was in the back seat, she said. The driver was short — about 5-foot-4 — but his friend was about 6- feet tall, she testified.