Sex offender arrested after allegedly breaking into girl’s bedroom in Stanislaus County
A Grayson father tackled an intruder and restrained him with duct tape after the man broke into in his 5-year-old daughter’s bedroom early Tuesday morning.
The girl’s mother, Martha Zapeda, said her daughter was sleeping with Zapeda’s mother when the grandmother sensed they were being watched through the bedroom window. The grandma left the bedroom to alert the parents, leaving the girl asleep in bed.
When Zapeda came out of her room, she could see a man standing outside the living room window. He was pleasuring himself, she said.
“I love you,” Zapeda said the man would say as he continued to touch himself.
Zapeda’s husband went outside and told the man to leave. He later went to check the kitchen window to make sure he was leaving, but heard blinds being moved from his daughter’s bedroom, where the window was open but the screen was closed.
The man had made his way into the bedroom and had just turned on the lights when Zapeda’s husband walked in.
Zapeda said in an interview at the home Tuesday afternoon that her daughter thankfully didn’t see anything, but had a headache believed to have stemmed from the scare.
The father dragged the intruder outside. Zapeda said he tried to escape two times, but instead of running away from the scene he would try to run back into the house. Eventually, Zapeda said she and her husband were able to hold him down and restrain him using duct tape until authorities arrived. That’s when the husband noticed that the man was wearing an ankle monitor.
The suspect, later identified as Daniel Diaz, 39, of Turlock, is a convicted sex offender.
Once police arrived, Zapeda said, the man acted as if he was the victim, even asking the family if everyone was OK. “He commented about things that were irrelevant, as if we were the ones that were hurting him,” she said.
Zapeda said even though the man has been arrested, she’s still scared that someone will come into her home again. Zapeda said she and her mother keep thinking how much the couple struggled to detain the man and how different things would have been if her husband hadn’t been there.
“I’m scared to even leave them alone,” she said.
Diaz was arrested on suspicion of home invasion, burglary, child abuse, peeping and prowling, said Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Sgt. Luke Schwartz.
In 2009, Diaz was convicted of breaking into a 64-year-old woman’s home in Newman and attempting to rape her the year before.
According to a Modesto Bee story at the time, the victim told police she was awakened by a man who was touching her and talking to her. He rubbed her thigh and whispered, “I’m Daniel.”
The victim escaped briefly, but the suspect forced her back into the bedroom, police said. The woman escaped a second time by biting Diaz, then ran to a neighbor’s home as Diaz fled on his bicycle. He was later found in a Newman park.
Diaz was sentenced to four years in prison and ordered to register as a sex offender, the District Attorney’s office said at the time.
This story was originally published July 7, 2021 at 9:20 AM.
