Jonathan Ashton Aikin has already pleaded not guilty to barging into a San Clemente home on a quiet Sunday morning, violently attacking a stranger in her bed with her children, yelling for her to shut the windows “to keep the demons out,” squeezing her neck so hard she could barely eat afterward and holding her in a death grip.
What saved the woman, identified only as Olive, was her 5-year-old son jumping on the man's back and a U.S. Marine who lives upstairs coming down to drag the attacker off her. Deputies had to use a Taser gun to subdue him.
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Sheriff's deputies have identified 18-year-old Aikin as the assailant. If, as his plea indicates, he did not do the crime, it will be interesting to see what explanation he has in court for the cuts, bruises, and swelling shown in his booking photo.
Perhaps Aikin or his lawyer will argue it is mere coincidence the young man's wounds are consistent with those inflicted from someone fighting for her life, a child thumping his mother's attacker and a Marine doing what Marines do to baddies.
Aikin is being held in lieu of $100,000 bail on charges of sexual battery, being under the influence
of a controlled substance, burglary and child endangering. The boy required treatment for wounds he suffered, as did his mother.
Olive fears she would have died had her son and Justin Gerou, the Marine, not rescued her from the attack, which happened around 9:45 a.m. Sunday in the 300 block of Cazador Lane. She'd left the front door unlocked because her kids were running inside and outside to play. Her dogs barked loudly and in a way she'd never heard before moments before the daylight nightmare began.
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.