Man Accused Of Holding Teen Captive For 10 Years Gets 4 Years In Prison

A man who was accused of kidnapping a teenage girl and imprisoning her for a decade was sentenced to just over four years today. Isidro Medrano Garcia, 42, was sentenced to four years and four months in a state prison on Friday, and he will have to register as a sex offender after his release for the rest of his life, KTLA reports. He was arrested in 2014, and convicted on March 4 of three felony counts of lewd acts on a minor.

Garcia was facing several more charges, though a jury ended up acquitting him of kidnapping charges and was hung on charges of forcible rape—a charge that was later dismissed at the request of the Orange County District Attorney's office.

Garcia met the victim while he was dating and living with her mother. The victim immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico to live with her mother and sister in Santa Ana, and had no papers and could not speak English at the time. She was 15 years old in 2004 when she says Garcia drugged and kidnapped her. He supplied her with a fake name and also took an alias for himself, and the pair worked as janitors at the same company together. She said he forced her to marry him and have a child with him. The victim said over the decade she was his captive, she suffered physical and sexual abuse, and that Garcia told her that her family no longer wanted her and threatened her with deportation if she ever went to police. She contacted authorities after her sister made contact with her via Facebook.

Garcia's attorney, however, claimed that the victim went with Garcia willingly, and later made up the kidnapping story. Some of Garcia's neighbors described him as a hard-working man who was dedicated to his family, while others said they found him controlling towards his family and rarely let the victim spend time outside.