Arraignment was delayed Tuesday afternoon for a Buena Park man with a violent history accused of attacking five women in a crime spree that spanned five hours and two cities.
Ulises Omar De La Torre, 32, allegedly stabbed three of the women in the head, face or back.
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The violence began around 5:15 p.m. last Thursday, Jan. 16, when a woman walking home from work was approached by a man in Anaheim seeking to strike up a conversation. After she passed the stranger, he smacked the back of her head, continued beating on her and tried to remove her pants before darting off.
A short time later, a man entered a second woman's home just as she was arriving, stabbed her in the arm and back and then fled when her boyfriend arrived.
Two other women were in the hallway of a nearby hotel and getting ready to enter their room when a man tried to force his way in with them. As they resisted him and screamed for help, they were stabbed in the head, face and arms. The intruder then fled.
Finally, a woman was jogging in Garden Grove around 10:30 p.m. when she realized she was being followed, turned around, was punched in the face and knocked to the ground. Her male attacker kept punching her and tried to remove her clothing before her screams sent him away.
After an investigation by the Anaheim and Garden Grove police departments, De La Torre was arrested as the suspect in all these attacks on Saturday.
The Orange County District Attorney's office (OCDA) later charged him with one felony count of kidnapping to commit rape, two felony counts of assault with the intent to commit a sexual offense, and three felony counts of assault with the intent to commit a sexual offense in the commission of first degree burglary. He also faces sentencing enhancements for causing great bodily injury, great bodily injury to a sexual assault victim, the use of a deadly weapon during a sexual offense.
Meanwhile, the OCDA also disclosed De La Torre has two prior strike convictions from 2004 for attempted murder and street terrorism. Currently being held on $1 million bail, he faces a maximum sentence of 244 years to life in state prison with a conviction, according to prosecutors.
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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.