A Look Behind Mystery of Poway Rape : Lack of Apology to Suspects Leaves Legacy of Ill Will

The case galvanized public attention: Authorities said a group of suspected illegal aliens had attacked a 15-year-old American girl in a back alley in the suburban community of Poway, surrounding her, dragging her from her horse, pinning her down as one raped her.

“Eight men popped up in front of this girl like a skirmish line,” a sheriff’s deputy was quoted as saying shortly after the alleged incident April 24.

The reported attack--against the daughter of a San Diego police officer and a county sheriff’s deputy--served as a focus on rising tensions. The allegation arose at a time when uneasiness had been mounting between northern San Diego County’s mostly middle-class suburban residents, overwhelmingly white, and the migrant workers from Mexico who were their unlikely neighbors.

“Something is going to happen here; it’s just a question of when,” Bob Fenner, a parent from the North County community of Carlsbad, had told authorities during a fiery meeting on the issue in late 1986, according to an account in the San Diego Union.

Now, almost four months after the reported rape, after all charges have been dropped, the case has left a legacy of ill will and confusion--and about $7 million in civil claims against San Diego County. Critical questions remain unanswered in this very public, racially charged case, including the central one: Did a rape ever occur?

Scores of Latinos were detained and six had spent up to two months in jail in connection with the case, but authorities have provided only scant details--and no apologies.

Despite the gap in public knowledge, an examination of sheriff’s reports along with interviews of the former suspects, attorneys, investigators and others, has made it possible to piece together what happened in Poway on the evening of April 24 and during the ensuing investigation.

What emerges is a portrait of a girl insisting that she was the victim of a vile gang attack; of law enforcement authorities assiduously tracking down every lead; and of a group of confused and frightened “suspects,” all from a very distinct culture, all speaking a foreign language, who were caught between their own claims of innocence and a divided community’s demands for justice.

Like many communities in northern San Diego County, Poway, with about 40,000 residents, is rapidly undergoing the transformation from a semi-rural valley hide-out to a suburban bedroom community. It prides itself as “The City in the Country,” and the characterization still has some truth: rugged foothills to the east form a picture-postcard Western backdrop to this sun-drenched former stagecoach and railroad terminus. It is not unusual to find horse corrals, chicken coops and goat pens near newly constructed apartment complexes and housing tracts that cater to young professionals.

But, as with neighboring residential areas, there is another population here. For years, migrant Mexican workers have crossed the border just 35 miles south and sought work in farms, nurseries, construction and other fields throughout northern San Diego County--a movement that has accelerated since 1982, when the Mexican economy went sour.

Poor Live Next to Wealthy

Frequently, the workers cannot afford local rents on their meager wages and instead live in crudely constructed shacks amid the chaparral and brush, often uncomfortably close to the burgeoning suburban developments, creating a Third-World-like juxtaposition of the poor and the wealthy.

“What’s so unusual about North County is that you see great poverty literally cheek-by-jowl with affluence,” said Daniel H. Wolf, a researcher at the UC San Diego Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies. Wolf has authored a study on relations between the migrant workers and other residents. “The fact that these people are of a different national origin adds a level of nonunderstanding as well as misunderstanding.”

Anglo homeowners, who complain of a rash of burglaries and vandalism, accuse the migrants of committing such crimes disproportionately to their population. Rights advocates say this is greatly exaggerated, a product of fear and racial stereotyping of people speaking a different language.

Faced with occasional hostility and always subject to arrest by immigration authorities, the workers have formed microcommunities that provide a measure of support. The area near the central drag of Midland Road has become a gathering point for many migrants from the tiny community of San Jeronimo Silacayoapilla, deep in the interior state of Oaxaca, about 2,000 miles away.

“I heard about this place from others who had been here before,” said Jorge Luis Mendez Herrera, a reticent 20-year-old from the San Jeronimo region who was among the six arrested and was found recently living in the hills above the spot where the rape was alleged to have occurred. “I just came here to work,” said Mendez, who sat on a Midland Road bus-stop bench one recent evening as Anglo joggers and bicycle riders passed by.

That sentiment was echoed by Monica Acevedo Arce, an 18-year-old who was also among the six arrested, and, like the others, has returned. “We never bother anybody,” said Acevedo. “The Mexican people here, all we want to do is find work. We want to help our families in Mexico.”

Along with migrant workers, the upper Midland Road area, with its sleepy, country ambiance, is also a favorite place for the area’s many horseback-riding enthusiasts, among them the 15-year-old girl who claims she was raped. The girl, who lives in Rancho Bernardo with her father, a longtime San Diego police officer, and her stepmother, a state campus police official, also keeps a horse at the nearby home of her natural mother, a sheriff’s deputy.

According to all versions of the story, the girl was riding her horse on Sunday evening, April 24. She told police she left the Midland Road house of some friends, on horseback, at about 7 p.m., although the friends, Tina and Cruz Aspeytia, later recalled that she may have left at 7:30 p.m.

Shortly after leaving the Aspeytias’ house, the girl told police, she was riding her horse on a dirt path behind the Old Poway Market on Midland Road, en route to her mother’s house, a few blocks to the south, when she encountered a group of eight Mexican men drinking beer. The men, she told police, formed a line and began walking toward her.

One of the assailants then grabbed the reins of the horse, she told authorities, as another clutched her sweat shirt and threw her to the ground. He then put a “choke hold” on her as she yelled, screamed and tried to hit him, she said. The others, now including a “Mexican female,” then encircled the girl.

As one man held her, she told police, another pulled down her pants, as well as his own, and raped her; the act lasted 30 seconds. The attackers then ran away, the girl found her horse and rode back to the Aspeytias’ house, according to her account.

The girl, clearly upset, returned to the Aspeytias’ house about 20 minutes after leaving. She said nothing about a rape, the friends recalled. “She just told me that some guys messed around with her,” Cruz Aspeytia said in an interview.

In a statement to police, Tina Aspeytia said the girl “appeared to be in shock.” The friend quoted the girl as saying, “Oh my God, I can’t believe what they did to me.”

Almost immediately, Cruz Aspeytia said, he and his wife, with the girl following on horseback, left for her mother’s house. They left the horse there and quickly returned in the Aspeytias’ car to the area of the Old Poway Market, looking for the men who had been “messing” with the girl, Aspeytia said. The girl recognized one of two men walking near the market, prompting Aspeytia to leave the car and approach him, he recalled.

“I just warned them not to mess with her again,” said Aspeytia, who brandished a chain and spoke Spanish. “I didn’t know she’d been raped.”

Shortly afterward, Aspeytia said he drove the girl back to her father’s home. That evening she finally told her father she had been raped, prompting him to call the sheriff’s office.

On Sundays, undocumented workers in Poway often gather in a field behind Tierra Bonita School, near Twin Peaks Road, where they play pickup games of soccer and volleyball, shoot hoops on nearby baskets, or just relax in the grass. April 24 was no different, according to the six former suspects, all of whom say they spent the afternoon at the field, arriving separately, and joining more than 50 others there.

Car Was Stopped by Deputy

After the game, six Mexicans, five of whom were later arrested, said they left the field together shortly after dusk, which fell at 7:25 p.m., and headed back to the Midland Road area, a short distance away, in a 1977 Ford Mustang owned by Camerino Cedillo Martinez, the driver. Heading north on Midland Road, less than two blocks south of the Old Poway Market, near where the rape allegedly occurred, the five, accompanied by a sixth person known only as El Caballo, said that a sheriff’s officer stopped their car.

Sheriff’s Deputy William Donahue, in his report on the incident, said he stopped the vehicle at 7:47 p.m. at Midland Road and Poinsettia Drive because it had its parking lights on, in violation of the traffic code. He discovered that neither the driver of the car nor its passengers had a driver’s license and impounded the car.

At 8:10 p.m., Donahue wrote, the driver and his passengers began walking north on Midland Road. They told police and repeated in interviews that they were heading to the nearby house of a friend, a licensed driver, to seek his help in getting their car back.

En route to the licensed driver’s house, the former suspects said, they encountered the girl--smoking a cigarette while riding her white horse--at a spot about 100 yards north of the traffic stop, on a eucalyptus-shaded dirt path along busy Midland Road. Several of them recognized her as “Marcela,” which is not her real name but is the name she was known by to area migrants, who had seen her frequently riding in the area. Communicating in broken English and some Spanish, they said, they talked briefly with her.

“I asked her for a cigarette,” recalled Guadalupe Cedillo Martinez, 18, who was eventually accused of being the one who held the girl down while another raped her. “We just made some small talk.”

Guadalupe Cedillo said he and the man known as El Caballo stayed behind with the girl for a few minutes while the other four walked on to the house of the licensed driver. Cedillo said the girl allowed him to ride behind her on the horse for the short jaunt to the market, as El Caballo followed on foot, until they split up cordially and the two men rejoined their friends.

“She seemed friendly, but we didn’t say much,” said Cedillo, who since the incident has obtained temporary legal status in the United States as part of the farm-worker amnesty program. “We were with her for five minutes or so. Nothing happened. We just talked a little. She seemed relaxed, not nervous at all,” added Cedillo, interviewed on a recent Sunday playing soccer at the field frequented by migrants.

By the time the group returned to the site of the car stop with the licensed driver, they said, the car had already been towed. At that point, two of the men, including Leonardo Martinez Cedillo, who was later accused of being the actual rapist, say they were confronted near the Old Poway Market by a man who turned out to be Cruz Aspeytia, the girl’s chain-brandishing friend.

“He told us to stop bothering the girl, he was really mad,” recalled Martinez, who is not related to his other companions with similar names. “I told him we never did anything to her. We only talked to her. I couldn’t understand why he was so mad.”

That evening, at her father’s house, the girl provided investigators with nebulous descriptions of her alleged attackers: The eight male suspects were said to be Mexican men whose ages ranged from the late teens to early 40s. The woman suspect was short, in her 20s with long dark hair, she told police.

A few hours later, the girl’s stepmother took her to be examined by a doctor at Children’s Hospital and Health Center in San Diego, at the request of the Sheriff’s Department. A doctor there found a fresh cut in her genital area, an injury often associated with rape, officials said, but one that defense lawyers say could also be the result of rough consensual sex. The girl told doctors that she had not had sex, apart from the incident, in the past 72 hours.

The doctor made several other tests that are standard in such cases. Medical and law enforcement authorities declined to say if any other physical evidence emerged indicating a rape.

The Hunt for Suspects Began

The next day, police began looking for suspects, and the pace was brisk.

At a preshift hearing on April 25 at the Poway sheriff’s station, Deputy D. K. Gaddis recalled in his report, the two “main suspects” in the case were described as “illegal alien looking, Hispanic male adults. . . .”

Soon, as word of the reported rape spread, deputies and Border Patrol officers, accompanied by a SWAT team armed with automatic weapons, began combing the hills and roadsides, eventually detaining about 80 Latinos. Civil libertarians denounced the sweeps as a dragnet based on race, but a local councilwoman commented: “I think the Sheriff’s Department sent a clear message that this type of crime won’t be tolerated in Poway.”

Within days of the reported rape, sheriff’s officers had questioned five of the six eventual suspects, although all were released pending further investigation. A final suspect, the man known only as El Caballo, was never found, and was presumed to have returned to Mexico.

Soon, officers heard outlines of events that would emerge as central to the migrants’ version of what happened that Sunday evening: the afternoon at the soccer field, the sheriff’s stop of the migrants’ vehicle, the encounter with “Marcela” on her horse and the confrontation with the girl’s chain-brandishing friend.

All six suspects, questioned separately and intensely, gave fairly consistent stories and adamantly denied that any rape or attack occurred, according to sheriff’s reports.

As the investigation progressed, one suspect, Leonardo Martinez, began to stand out as the alleged rapist: Found in his trailer were a turquoise tank-top shirt and black slacks, clothing that matched the description given by the girl of her attacker’s garb.

Late in the evening of April 25, sheriff’s Detective Richard G. Stok, who headed the investigation, showed the girl a photo lineup that included a picture of Martinez, who has a mustache. She was unable to identify a suspect, explaining that she didn’t think the suspect had a mustache, according to the detective’s report.

Showed Friend a Picture

The next day, the detective showed the same lineup to the victim’s friend, Cruz Aspeytia, who tentatively identified Martinez as one of the two men he had confronted near the market on the night of the reported rape.

On April 29, however, detective Stok received a telephone call from the girl’s stepmother: While assisting on a composite drawing of the suspect, the girl had recalled that the alleged rapist had a birthmark or abrasion on his right cheek. Martinez has such a bruise.

Later that day, the girl, shown a different photo lineup, positively identified Martinez as the rapist. Under questioning by the detective, the girl acknowledged that, since last viewing the photographs, she had discussed the lineup with her friend Aspeytia, who had already tentatively identified Martinez. But the girl insisted that she had recalled the bruise independently.

The detective was apparently convinced. After receiving the girl’s “positive identification,” sheriff’s deputies arrested Martinez that day and charged him with rape. Five other arrests would follow in coming days, four after photo identifications by the girl and the other after the suspect “admitted” being in the group that encountered the girl the evening the alleged rape occurred, according to a sheriff’s report. Among the five arrested was Jorge Luis Mendez Herrera, who wasn’t even in the group that encountered the girl that evening, according to the accounts of all the suspects.

The six--all undocumented immigrants from Mexico, all in their late teens and early 20s--were in jail, facing sentences of up to nine years in prison if convicted. Some said they were threatened and abused, both by deputies and fellow inmates, but were more fearful of their uncertain futures.

“All the time we were in jail, we never knew our fate,” said one of the six, Jose Luis Romero, 20, a gregarious former resident of Mexico City. “The sheriff told us we could spend 10 or 20 years in jail. They said rape was worse than murder. We were filled with anguish.”

On June 27, as the suspects’ court-appointed attorneys were preparing for a preliminary hearing, the prosecutor, Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael Przytulski, informed them of a surprising new development: The girl was pregnant, a predicament that could only have resulted from the rape, according to defense attorneys’ account of the prosecutor’s comments.

Allowed Blood Samples

Robert Carriedo, the lawyer representing Martinez, the alleged rapist, readily agreed to allow blood samples to be taken from his client and matched against those of the fetus, which was apparently to be aborted. “We had no problem with the blood test, because we knew it would show my client’s innocence,” Carriedo said.

The blood comparisons were apparently never made. On June 30, Przytulski announced to a stunned courtroom that unspecified new evidence “favorable” to the defendants had prompted prosecutors to drop charges, a decision jointly agreed upon by the district attorney’s office, the Sheriff’s Department and the victim’s family.

“We couldn’t prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt,” said Przytulski.

That day, all six suspects were released from custody, and all soon returned to their semi-shadow life style in Poway. But, although they were free, there was no exoneration: The San Diego County district attorney’s office has refused to detail why charges were dropped, citing the girl’s privacy rights.

Meantime, the six, eager to get on with their lives, haven’t found it easy. The time in jail had cost them jobs, homes and the modicum of stable life style that they had worked hard to achieve. Some of them worry because their families in Mexico have heard about the incident. Each of the six has filed a $1-million wrongful-arrest claim against the county.

“I haven’t found jobs like I had before,” said Romero, who spoke as he stood in the parking lot of the Old Poway Market on a recent afternoon. “We’ve had to start all over. I’ve found a little work, but not like I had before this happened. My landlady said she didn’t want Mexicans anymore, that we cause too much trouble.”

While voicing little rancor about their treatment, all express continued puzzlement and the strong fear that the cloud of suspicion will continue to hover above them--and possibly even hurt their chances to legalize their immigration status.

“We don’t want vengeance,” concluded Leonardo Martinez, the eldest of the six at 24, who was found recently near some horse corrals where he now works as a stable boy. “We want our names to be cleared, to have the records cleaned. . . . But I still don’t understand. Why did this girl accuse us? Why didn’t the sheriffs investigate better? Why did they treat us like criminals when we didn’t do anything?”

1. The home of the girl’s friends, 14200 block of Midland Road. The girl says she left the house with a horse about 7 p.m. April 24, heading for her mother’s house. The friends say she may have left at 7:30 p.m., and returned about 20 minutes later, obviously shaken.

2. Home of girl’s mother, on nearby Somerset Road.

3. Old Poway Market, 14047 Midland Road. Shortly after leaving friends’ house, girl says, she was approached by a group on the dirt alley behind the market. She says one man pulled her off the horse and held her on the ground while another raped her as the others, including a woman, encircled her. When they were done, she says, they ran away and she got back on the horse, returning to her friends’ home.

4. Tierra Bonita School. The six suspects say they spent much of the afternoon at the soccer field behind the school along with other migrant workers, most of them not leaving until shortly after sunset, which occurred at 7:25. Five say they left in the car of a friend.

5. Midland Road, corner of Poinsettia Drive, where a sheriff’s deputy says he stopped the car at 7:47 p.m. because of a traffic violation. He remained with the driver and passengers until 8:10 p.m., when they left on foot, going north on Midland Road. They say they were seeking a friend with a driver’s license so the car would not be impounded.

6. A spot about 100 yards north of traffic stop where, suspects say, they encountered the girl briefly as they walked north on the east side of Midland Road and she was headed south on her horse. They say they chatted amiably with her for a few minutes. She gave one of them a ride for about a block to the Old Poway Market and they split up amicably, according to his account.