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Jose Angel Barajas-Mireles, Gomez and Guillermo have been arrested for kidnapping and holding a woman in captivity, raping and beating her for weeks before she managed to escape, authorities said.
Jose Angel Barajas-Mireles, 34, was jailed Wednesday on suspicion of aggravated sodomy, aggravated oral copulation and aggravated rape. He was accused of being the ringleader responsible for holding the victim against her will “since sometime during the holidays” at his home on the 3000 block of Stony Point Road near Santa Rosa, officials said.
The woman told investigators she was able to escape only when her captors left a door open at the residence where she was being held. Barajas-Mireles is not facing a kidnapping charge but “orchestrated the events that led to the victim being held captive,” investigators said.
Also arrested were Jaime Gomez Cisneros, 52, of Watsonville and 34-year-old Guillermo Crestino Avina of Santa Rosa. They were each booked on suspicion of false imprisonment and being an accessory to Barajas-Mireles for guarding the victim and preventing her from leaving, authorities said.
The investigation began Feb. 18, when the woman went to the Petaluma Police Department and told officers that she had been kidnapped and sexually assaulted over an extended period of time. The next day the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office detained several people after a SWAT team served a search warrant at the Stony Point Road residence.
The three suspects were arrested Wednesday when they went to the Sheriff’s Office in Santa Rosa to retrieve property that was seized during the search.
The county district attorney’s office still must decide whether to charge the three men and arraign them in court Friday.
On Thursday, a woman at the house on Stony Point Road — who gave her name only as Dee and said she was Avina’s girlfriend — told reporters that the victim had moved onto the property before Christmas of her own free will and had been in a consensual relationship with Jose Angel Barajas-Mireles.
“They did have a sexual relationship, but it wasn’t rape,” she said.
The woman said the victim had gotten Barajas-Mireles a Valentine’s Day present and had cooked him dinner the night before she went to police, but that their relationship went south when he rebuffed her advances.
“She got mad because she wanted to be with him and he didn’t want that. I never saw her mistreated,” the woman said.
Officials, though, said the victim had been systematically brutalized for an extended period of time by Barajas-Mireles, who they said was a stranger to her. The victim had injuries that corroborated her story, authorities said.
“These people were not her friends. They were not her relatives,” said Sgt. Cecile Focha, a spokeswoman for the Sheriff’s Office. “Nothing the victim said leads us to believe she was in a consensual relationship with any of these men.”
The Sheriff’s Office backed off an earlier statement that the woman had been abducted at gunpoint. Officials said the woman had initially made the assertion “out of an overwhelming sense of fear of retaliation coupled with the traumatic events she endured.”
Focha said the investigation was ongoing. Investigators, she said, were looking into how the victim came to be on the property, which is ringed by a tall fence and driveway gate and has a number of outbuildings — including a barn, several trailers and a garage that neighbors said had been converted into a living space.
Jose Angel Barajas-Mireles was being held on $6 million bail and Avina and Cisneros were being held in lieu of $11,000 and $10,000, respectively.
Agencies/Canadajournal
