{"id":158763,"date":"2026-02-01T04:30:07","date_gmt":"2026-02-01T04:30:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/158763\/"},"modified":"2026-02-01T04:30:07","modified_gmt":"2026-02-01T04:30:07","slug":"former-corona-church-volunteer-sentenced-to-138-years-for-sexually-assaulting-girls-after-convictions-in-oc-orange-county-register","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/158763\/","title":{"rendered":"Former Corona church volunteer sentenced to 138 years for sexually assaulting girls after convictions in OC \u2013 Orange County Register"},"content":{"rendered":"

SANTA ANA \u2014 A 61-year-old man was sentenced Friday to 138 years to life in prison for sexually assaulting five girls, including victims he met as a church volunteer.<\/a><\/p>\n

Jesus Heras Garcia was a volunteer at the Case de Vida Church in Corona and became a close family friend of the victims, police said. Investigators later tracked down two more girls who reported they were abused, police said.<\/p>\n

Garcia was convicted<\/a> Nov. 13, 2024, of 12 counts of lewd or lascivious acts with a minor, another count involving a child 10 or younger, two counts of lewd or lascivious acts with a minor younger than 14 and one count of aggravated sexual assault of a child, all felonies.<\/p>\n

The charges date back to 1986, according to court records.<\/p>\n

Three sisters when they were in their late teens and mid-20s reported to Santa Ana police in December 2018 that the defendant who they met through a church had molested them, police said.<\/p>\n

In another case reported to the Placentia Police Department in 2010, a woman who was 16 years old at the time said she had been molested by Garcia.<\/p>\n

In 2018, a 21-year-old told police she had been sexually assaulted multiple times at the defendant\u2019s home in Riverside when she was seven years old.<\/p>\n

The Orange County Register contributed to this story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SANTA ANA \u2014 A 61-year-old man was sentenced Friday to 138 years to life in prison for sexually…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":715,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[163,165,164,7,57655,10437,723,138,100,611,2463,8634,612,338,2531,7701,136],"class_list":["post-158763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anaheim","tag-anaheim","tag-anaheim-headlines","tag-anaheim-news","tag-california","tag-child-sex-abuse","tag-corona","tag-crime","tag-crime-and-public-safety","tag-news","tag-orange-county","tag-placentia","tag-riverside","tag-riverside-county","tag-santa-ana","tag-sexual-assault","tag-sexual-misconduct","tag-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=158763"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158763\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/715"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=158763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=158763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=158763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}