A Chicago man who kidnapped and repeatedly raped an 11-year-old girl in Santa Ana more than two decades ago was sentenced Friday, May 10 to 25 years to life in prison.
Ismael Salgado, now 44, was convicted earlier this year of five counts of rape, as well as kidnapping to commit a sex crime, related to a series of sexual assaults over a roughly two hour period on Feb. 3, 1999.
The sexual assaults of the 11-year-old girl went unsolved for more than 15 years until a DNA hit led police to Salgado and a man he was friends with at the time of the abduction. That former friend — Jose Andres Plascencia — was also convicted and sentenced last year to 25 years to life in prison.
The victim — in a statement read to the court by a prosecutor — wrote that the kidnapping and rapes had left her “the shell of a person I should have been,” and told Salgado that “the things you have done can never be forgiven …
“It is like a bad movie that plays over and over again, haunting me,” the victim wrote. “You have damaged me physically and mentally in ways words cannot describe.”
Orange County Superior Court Judge Steven Bromberg described Salgado’s actions as “vicious and callous,” adding that what the victim went through was “unimaginable.”
The judge said, “Clearly time does not heal the wounds in a case like this.”
The girl was walking with a 13-year-old friend on Monta Vista Avenue when Salgado, then 19, drove up next to them. Salgado and Plascencia — a passenger in the vehicle — “cat-called” the girls and convinced them to get into the car.
The girls quickly changed their minds, and the 13-year-old was able to get out of the car. But Salgado grabbed the 11-year-old by her hair and kept her in the vehicle as it pulled away, telling her, “We are going to rape you.”
Salgado drove to a gas station, according to testimony, where Plascencia kept his hand over the girl’s mouth while Salgado went inside to pay.
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The men then drove the girl to empty parking lots at Carr Intermediate School and Valley High School, where they took turns raping her while the other held her down. They dropped the girl off afterward at a relative’s home, but warned her that if she told anyone what happened they would rape her again.
The girl was able to pick the driver out of surveillance footage at a gas station, and DNA was collected as part of a sexual assault examination. But police were unable to identify either the driver or passenger and the case went cold.
In 2011, Salgado — who had since moved to Chicago — was required to submit a DNA sample to a law-enforcement database after pleading guilty to an unrelated grand theft case. That sample was eventually tied by investigators to DNA collected during the sexual assault examination of the 11-year-old in 1999.
Investigators began looking into people Salgado had been friends with in 1999, apparently leading them to Plascencia. They surreptitiously collected a DNA sample from a water bottle Plascencia left at a gym in Arizona, and used it to tie him to the abduction and rape. During his trial, Plascencia said he frequently drank and did drugs back in 1999 and had blacked out the night of the kidnapping and rapes.
During Salgado’s trial, Alternate Defender Peter Boldin argued that Salgado had nothing to do with the kidnapping or rapes, telling jurors that investigators had arrested the wrong man.
The defense attorney said Salgado had let Plascencia borrow his car and didn’t know who else had been in the vehicle. He argued that Salgado had previously had consensual sex with other women in his car, which could have resulted in his DNA being left on the leather seats and “transferred” onto the 11-year-old girl.
The prosecution and defense during the trial also argued over whether Salgado was the man captured in grainy gas station footage who was identified at the time by the victim. The defense said the man in the video had a different haircut than Salgado, while the prosecution countered that he had the same facial features.
