BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KGET) — A convicted rapist was sentenced on Friday for assaulting a woman just months after being released on parole, and this sentencing guarantees he will never see another day out of prison.
“I find that Mr. Venegas is a danger to society,” said Kern County Superior Court Judge David Zulfa at the sentencing. “He is likely, if not sentenced appropriately, to commit another felony.”
Convicted rapist Sergio Venegas guilty of attacking woman on Ming Ave
Sergio Venegas, 62, was sentenced to life without parole, plus 25 years to life, plus 12 years.
“I think the sentence was absolutely appropriate based on his history. Just the absolute terror that he has inflicted on this victim,” said Christine Antonios, the prosecutor on the case.
Sergio Venegas served 30 years in prison for raping a woman at the Red Lion Inn in 1989. He was also suspected, but never charged, in five other rapes in the late-’80s in which women were attacked while walking alone in grocery store parking lots.
Venegas earned the nickname “Supermarket Rapist.”
Venegas was paroled in 2021. Just months after his release, he attacked a woman as she was walking home from work.
The attack took place on Ming Avenue just next to the former Honey Baked Ham around 9 p.m.
Prosecutors said, while the woman walked on the sidewalk, Venegas came from behind the bushes and grabbed her by her hair.
“This was really a nightmare scenario for both the victim and for society, for the victim herself this was a stranger,” said Antonios.
Due to his parole, Venegas was wearing an ankle monitor. Probation officers saw the monitor pinging at the Honey Baked Ham for several minutes.
Officers arrested him that same night.
Zulfa and Antonios agreed giving Venegas a light sentence would be a danger to society,
“But in a larger scale of things, this is a nightmare scenario for society too,” Antonios said. “This is somebody that society had convicted previously in 1999, sent to prison. We had hoped that he could rehabilitate, learn his lesson, not victimize somebody else and none of those things happened.”
On one of the trial days, the victim who Venegas raped in 1989 read a letter.
In that letter, she said she still goes to therapy for the attack and she hasn’t told her husband all the details of what happened that night.