Patterson woman kidnapped, sexually assaulted by stranger. Her story comes out in court
A young Patterson woman gave harrowing testimony last month about the night in 2018 when a stranger got into her vehicle in Turlock, threatened to kill her, then kidnapped, beat and sexually assaulted her over a span of six hours.
On Wednesday, a jury convicted the assailant, 38-year-old Rene Trujillo, of five of the six charges against him. One of those charges comes with a possible life sentence.
The assault began around 2 a.m. on March 30, 2018, after the victim, who was 21 at the time, had been out drinking at a few bars in downtown Turlock with two of her co-workers. While she was identified in court, The Modesto Bee has a policy of not identifying victims of sexual assault unless they agree to it.
She testified that she doesn’t remember exactly how much she drank, but she became dizzy after walking to her vehicle at the end of the night and vomited.
One of her co-workers was with her; he testified that he tried to stay to help her but she told him to leave. The victim said she just wanted to sit in her vehicle and sober up before driving home.
She testified that she was sitting there looking at social media when a man opened the passenger side of her vehicle and got in.
In court on the witness stand, she began to weep when she had to stand up in order to get a better look at Trujillo and identify him as her attacker.
“I was confused,” the victim testified. “I asked him who he was and I asked him to get out of my car.”
Attacker threatened her life
Trujillo wouldn’t get out and asked her for a ride home. When she refused he said, “I’m not asking you, I’m telling you and if you don’t take me home, I’m going to kill you,” while he placed a hand on his hip.
“I was in shock, I just froze, I didn’t want to believe it was real,” the victim testified with tears rolling down her cheeks. “I would have never thought that this would happen to me, so I didn’t know how to react, and my initial reaction was just to listen to whatever he was telling me to do. I was scared of being killed and then no one was going to know where I was at because there was no one around.”
She began to drive and would turn when Trujillo told her to. When they reached a dark gravel road, he instructed her to park next to a trailer. He told her to get out and go in the trailer with him, but she refused.
He grabbed her by the hair, pulled it and began punching her in the face and head.
Trujillo then sexually assaulted the victim. She resisted and he continued to beat her.
In addition to punching her, he grabbed her head and hit it against the steering wheel on multiple occasions, she testified.
Meth smoke forced into mouth
Trujillo began smoking methamphetamine in the vehicle. The victim testified that he grabbed her face and forcibly blew the smoke into her mouth.
After that, she became numb. She testified that she could remember only certain events in the hours that followed: driving away from the dark, gravel street and trying to get the attention of another motorist; Trujillo forcing his way into the driver’s seat, elbowing her in the nose and punching her in the head; waking up after he crashed into a tree.
The victim testified that the OnStar system in her rear-view mirror began to sound and Trujillo became enraged. He continued his physical assault on her and tore off the mirror.
She said she next remembers being at a dairy in Merced County where Trujillo was talking to another man. She was afraid to do anything because she thought they might be working together.
Throughout the ordeal, Trujillo beat her every time she didn’t do what he said or he thought she was trying to get away, she said. But at times, she said, he would apologize and say he didn’t want to hurt her.
“It was like he was confusing me with someone he knew,” the victim testified. “He would say, ‘I’m sorry, I feel guilty that I did this to you, I’m not a bad person, tell them that I’m not a bad person.’“
Her vehicle was nearly out of gas when they left the dairy. The victim testified she saw a woman hanging laundry on a clothesline outside her home and convinced Trujillo that she would ask the woman for gas, then take Trujillo home and wouldn’t tell anyone about what happened.
Sought help, but it was refused
She said she grabbed her phone, of which Trujillo previously had possession, then got out of the car and ran across the road and a dirt field. She said she didn’t stop running until she reached the woman and told her she’d been kidnapped and needed help.
She testified that the woman told her she didn’t want to get involved.
When the victim saw Trujillo approaching them, the victim said she went behind the clothesline and called 911. When Trujillo reached them, the woman kept saying that she didn’t want to get involved, but the victim refused to move.
Eventually, a blue truck arrived and Trujillo got in and left with the driver.
The victim was on the phone with a dispatcher and had given her a description of Trujillo and the blue pickup. Around 8 a.m., two deputies who were responding to the scene spotted the pickup, pulled it over, ordered Trujillo out at gunpoint and arrested him.
In addition to the victim’s testimony, the jury heard over the course of the two weeks testimony from law enforcement who investigated the case, the victim’s two co-workers, witnesses who were there when she escaped, DNA experts and the nurse who conducted the sexual assault exam. They also watched police body camera video of both the victim and the suspect and recorded interviews and saw photos of the victim’s injuries, which included bruising throughout her body, particularly on her head and neck.
‘She was alone and vulnerable’
Deputy District Attorney Manroe Tyler said Trujillo would later admit to police that he didn’t know the victim, that he was transient and therefore had nowhere to go when he asked for a ride, and that he got into her car that night because he thought she was cute.
“He saw she was alone and vulnerable and vomiting, and he made sure no one was watching then took advantage of her,” he said during his closing arguments.
Trujillo’s defense attorney Russell Mangan told the jury during opening statement, “This is not so much a ‘he said, she said’ type of case; this is more of a she said, then she said, then she said, type of case.”
Mangan said the victim repeatedly lied about what she was doing before encountering Trujillo and how much she’d had to drink.
The victim lived with her parents, who she said were a strict traditional Mexican family and set a curfew for her of 11 p.m.
She testified that she told her parents she was working that night because “that was how I was able to do the things people my age are able to do.”
Mangan pointed out that she stuck with the lie about working when she called 911 and talked to the dispatcher, when she talked to the deputies at the scene and initially when she talked to the Turlock Police detective assigned to her case.
Credibility questioned
Mangan said during his closing argument that someone in a real emergency wouldn’t have the capacity to focus on lying. He counted the number of times she said “I don’t remember” on the stand — 158 — and said that, along with the lies, spoke to her lack of credibility.
Tyler said any gaps in the victim’s memory were a result of the trauma she endured.
“I’m asking you to believe the account of that scared 21-year-old,” he said to the jury. “I’m asking you to believe the account of a woman who chose again and again to survive.”
The jury did.
After about two days of deliberation, interrupted by a weeklong postponement after one juror tested positive for COVID-19, the jury found Trujillo guilty of kidnapping during a carjacking, kidnapping to commit sexual penetration, assault with the intent to commit sexual penetration or oral copulation, assault likely to produce great bodily injury and making criminal threats.
The jury was hung 10-2 on the count of oral copulation by force, so Judge Linda McFadden declared a mistrial on that charge.
Tyler is expected to tell the judge at Trujillo’s next hearing on Oct. 18 whether he plans to retry that count, but the defendant is already facing a life sentence for the crime of kidnapping during a carjacking, said DA spokesman John Goold.
A sentencing date for Trujillo has not been set.
This story was originally published October 11, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
