Court Upholds Kidnapping, Rape Conviction of North Hollywood Man

A state appellate court panel today upheld the conviction of a North Hollywood man who slipped into a woman's vehicle at a Van Nuys convenience store, forced her to drive to a vacant apartment and raped her.

"The evidence of defendant's guilt was overwhelming," Associate Justice Thomas Lyle Willhite Jr. wrote on behalf of the three-justice panel that considered the appeal filed on behalf of Edgar Alonzo Velasquez.

Velasquez got into the back seat of the woman's unlocked car while she went inside the store, then jumped up from the back seat when she returned to the vehicle, grabbed her throat, pushed an object into her ribs and told her he had a gun, the appellate court panel noted in its 20-page ruling.

The woman was sexually assaulted over an hourlong period after being ordered to drive to the vacant apartment.

The manager of the apartment building testified that Velasquez worked for a company that remodeled some of the vacant units in the building, including the one where the attack occurred, and that she only was given one of the two keys to that unit when the work was completed.

Velasquez was arrested about a month after the March 25, 2009, attack.

He testified on his own behalf during trial, maintaining that he engaged in consensual sex with the woman, according to the ruling.

Velasquez was convicted in June 2010 of nine counts, including carjacking, kidnapping with the intent to commit rape, sexual penetration by a foreign object, sodomy by use of force, forcible oral copulation and forcible rape.

He was sentenced in September 2010 to 50 years to life in state prison.