‘Help me’: Texas man pleads guilty in kidnapping of teen who wrote dire escape note
A Texas man pleaded guilty Friday in the kidnapping of a 13-year-old girl abducted at gunpoint from a San Antonio street to Southern California, federal prosecutors said.
A Texas man pleaded guilty Friday in the kidnapping of a 13-year-old girl abducted at gunpoint from a San Antonio street to Southern California, federal prosecutors said. The teen aided in her own rescue after she was left in a car, scribbled a note with the words “help me,” and flashed the sign toward a “good Samaritan” who dialed 911.
Steven Sablan, 62, agreed to a deal in which he pleaded guilty to one count of kidnapping and admitted to sexually assaulting the girl multiple times before police arrested him in July in Long Beach, where he had taken the victim, according to the the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California.
A criminal complaint filed against Sablan laid out the victim’s harrowing ordeal and how she took a risk to get the attention of passersby to contact police.
Sablan, of the Dallas-Fort Worth area, had no legal custody or familial relationship to the teenage girl, authorities said.
He saw her walking down the street near a bus stop, raised a handgun and ordered her in the front passenger seat of his silver Nissan Sentra, an FBI agent investigating the case said in an affidavit.
Rating: 5