A Fullerton man who served as a youth leader at a Rowland Heights church was arrested in San Bernardino County for allegedly engaging in a sexual relationship with a 13-year-old girl, according to authorities. Around 11:55 p.m. Sunday, California Highway Patrol officers found the girl and Yanhao Ren, a 24-year-old who is also known as Eric Ren, in a vehicle parked on a turn-out of Highway 330 near Fredalba Road, in an unincorporated area of the county near Running Springs, according to the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department. She met Ren through youth programs at Evangelical Formosan Church of Rowland Heights, where he served for two years and has attended since 2006, deputies say. “The victim and Ren told detectives that they began a sexual relationship in May of 2015,” reads a SBCSD statement.
]
“Investigators have determined that during the following months they engaged in several sexual acts in the counties of Orange, Los Angeles and San Bernardino.”
Ren was booked into San Bernardino County Jail, where he was being held on $500,000 bail, on suspicion of kidnapping, sodomy with a child under 14, oral copulation with a child under 14 and other crimes.
Arraignment was scheduled Wednesday afternoon. Meanwhile, anyone with information that can help investigators is asked to call Detective John Everman at 909.387.3615.
Email: mc****@oc******.com. Twitter: @MatthewTCoker. Follow OC Weekly on Twitter @ocweekly or on Facebook!
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.