Isidro Medrano Garcia abducted his girlfriend’s teenage daughter, fathered her child and used threats and manipulation to hold her captive psychologically for 10 years, even as she feigned happiness to the outside world, an Orange County prosecutor said Thursday.
“This is a case about manipulation,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Whitney Bokosky told jurors in her opening statement at Garcia’s trial in a Fullerton courtroom.
Garcia, 42, a former janitor and machine operator from Bell Gardens, was living in a Santa Ana apartment complex with his girlfriend and her teenage daughter in 2004. Around the time the girl turned 15, the prosecutor said, Garcia began sexually assaulting her.
The girl had seen Garcia hit her mother and feared his violence, Bokosky said, and she was vulnerable and confused. She had been raised in Mexico and recently brought into the United States illegally, with no command of English.
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