Girl playing outside was sexually assaulted in 2012, CA cops say. Man convicted
More than a decade ago, a 6-year-old girl playing outside her home was kidnapped, then sexually assaulted, California police say.
Francisco Javier Lopez, of Montebello, has been convicted of 11 counts in connection with the alleged 2012 kidnapping and sexual assault, the Santa Ana Police Department said in a Sept. 17 Facebook post.
Attorney information for Lopez was not immediately available.
As the girl played outside her home in Santa Ana on July 15, 2012, police said Lopez approached.
Police said Lopez got out of his car and told the girl, “I have something for you to give to your mother,” City News Service reported.
Lopez took the girl from her home and “drove her to a nearby parking lot, where he sexually assaulted her,” police said.
About two hours after the girl was taken from her home, she was “essentially dumped out” in a nearby neighborhood where people were searching for her, police said, City News Service reported.
At the time, Lopez lived at the same apartment complex as the girl but did not know her or her family, police told the outlet.
Police said detectives investigated the incident, collecting DNA evidence that was submitted to California’s statewide database.
Then, when a woman related to Lopez was convicted of a separate Orange County crime two years later, her DNA samples were also sent to the statewide database, Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer told The Orange County Register in 2019.
The sample, however, sat untouched for several years “until technology caught up,” Spitzer told the newspaper.
Eventually, police said, DNA testing “generated a historic lead, matching a female relative of Lopez.”
“This was the first female familial DNA match in Orange County and only the second in California’s history,” police said.
After the match surfaced, Lopez was arrested and charged in 2019, police said.
Lopez is scheduled to appear in court for sentencing Oct. 9, according to police.
Santa Ana is about a 30-mile drive southeast from Los Angeles.
