A 51-year-old man was sentenced Friday to life in prison without the possibility of parole for kidnapping and raping a 6-year-old girl in Santa Ana in 2012.
Francisco Javier Lopez was convicted Sept. 16 of kidnapping to commit rape, four counts of oral copulation or sexual penetration with a child 10 years or younger, and five counts of forcible lewd acts on a child, all felonies.
Orange County Superior Court Judge Kathleen Roberts sentenced Lopez to five consecutive terms of life in prison without the possibility of parole and ordered him to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life. Lopez has been behind bars for 2,601 days.
Lopez was implicated due to improved DNA testing, which led to his arrest in a cold case when scientists in the state’s crime laboratory were able to search for DNA connections to female defendants in 2018. Until then, familiar DNA markers were limited to male defendants, but the change led them to a “close relative” of Lopez.
Santa Ana police then began surveillance of Lopez, which led to the collection of “discarded evidence” that provided investigators with Lopez’s DNA, police said at a news conference announcing the case against Lopez in 2019. Scientists in the Orange County Crime Laboratory then developed a match from Lopez’s DNA to the evidence collected from the rape of the girl.
The girl was abducted on July 15, 2012 “in broad daylight” while she was playing with a 4-year-old boy in front of an apartment complex at 1422 S. Townsend St. between 6 and 6:30 p.m. on a Sunday night, police said.
Lopez walked over to the girl as she played with a 4-year-old friend and handed her a note for her mother before hurling her scooter aside and forcing her into his car, police testified at his preliminary hearing.
The kidnapper drove nearly three-quarters of a mile to a parking lot at 1406 W. Edinger Ave., about three blocks west of Bristol Street, where he sexually assaulted the child and poured beer on her genitals, police said.
About 90 minutes to two hours later, she was “essentially dumped out” in a neighborhood where the people who were searching for the tot found her, police said.
Lopez lived in the same apartment complex as the victim, but did not appear to have any contact with the child or her family prior to the abduction, police said, adding that his criminal background did not include any similar crimes.
The unnamed female relative of Lopez was convicted of an unspecified crime in 2014 and her DNA was entered into the state’s database, Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer said.