A woman repeatedly trying to get out of a moving vehicle in front of a Placentia police officer early Sunday led to a report of a sexual assault, a brief search and a man's eventual arrest.
The starting point was where the cop first saw the vehicle just before 3 a.m.: on Placentia Avenue near Chapman Avenue. Actually, it began before that, at an Anaheim Hills-area nightclub, where the woman had her purse and cell phone stolen. A man politely offered her a ride home–but once her got her inside his ride he got grabby, according to cops.
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Fast forward to Placentia and Chapman, where the patrol officer noticed the woman repeatedly trying to get out of the moving vehicle before making a traffic stop at a nearby restaurant parking lot, according to Placentia Police Lt. Eric Point.
The lady quickly got out and ran back to the officer, and as she was saying the driver had sexually assaulted her, the fellow drove off west on Chapman Avenue into Fullerton, Point said.
This led to a search that involved an Anaheim Police Department helicopter. The vehicle being spotted near Acacia Drive and Wilshire Avenue, where a man was founding lying in a residence's front yard, where he gave up to officers without a struggle, Point said.
After the woman positively identified him, 43-year-old Jose Antonio Rodriguez was arrested on suspicion of kidnapping for the purpose of a sex crime and other sexual assault offenses, and he was later booked into the Orange County Jail in lieu of $1 million bail.
Suggestion: Check the vehicle's trunk for her purse and cell phone.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.