Village Inn Restaurant manager Mohammad Yaqoob may not have had any prospects for a Valentine's Day date in February 2007, so he decided he'd focus his lust on a 17-year-old high-school girl who was working for him part-time.
Indeed, there's evidence the then-29-year-old Yaqoob thought he'd committed the perfect crime.
He bought the minor two bottles of Alize wine, encouraged her to get drunk at work, watched her vomit, stripped off her pants, raped her, and later calmly claimed the girl's recollections could not be trusted because she'd been intoxicated.
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And for a period, it looked as if Yaqoob's plan would succeed. After returning home and telling her mother about the sexual assault, the mother absentmindedly washed her daughter's blood-stained underwear before handing the garment over to police.
But the next day, detectives rushed the girl to the hospital. Nurses found Yaqoob's sperm in her vagina and anus. To help seal their case, detectives then got the victim to call Yaqoob, who admitted in a recorded telephone call that he'd put his penis in her “only a little bit.”
At trial, Yaqoob attempted to portray the girl as a slut, but a 2009 jury convicted him anyway.
In hopes of overturning his conviction, Yaqoob argued that he should have been allowed to search through the girl's MySpace records to find evidence she'd been no angel. He also claimed police had violated his rights by not giving him his Miranda warning in his native language, Mypar.
In recent weeks, appellate justices in Santa Ana rejected all of Yaqoob's arguments.
“Nothing in the record suggests the prosecution's evidence was unreasonable, incredible or otherwise deficient,” the justices concluded.
They also noted that police had read Yaqoob his rights in Hindi, another language he speaks. As a result, the rapist will continue to serve his six-year prison sentence.
R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.
