Victims often have the opportunity to speak to their attackers during sentencing but on Wednesday, one victim described an attempted rape and how she calmly talked her attacker out of the crime.
The defendant, Carlos Ceron Salazar, received a sentence of 21 years and 4 months years for preying on women jogging in the Lake Poway and Miramar Lake area between 2004 and 2006.
Investigators eventually convicted Salazar with the help of evidence left by one of his victims. One woman, identified as “Cheryl,” was attacked at Miramar Lake in 2006. She bit Salazar in self-defense and dug her two teeth into his hand so deeply that when he pulled away, she lost the teeth.
Officers discovered them near the scene of the attack and were able to take DNA from them as well as from the blood from the bite that fell on her T-shirt. This evidence was eventually used to tie Salazar to the rape of another woman two years earlier.
One victim, identified in court as “Elizabeth”, was attacked along Lake Poway in October 2005.
She addressed the court in Spanish but through a translator told the story of how she was able to talk to Salazar and calm him down during the attack.
“I bit his hand that was covering my mouth and that is the way I began talking to him. I was terrified that he could rape me or even kill me with the anger that this man showed. I began speaking to him calmly. I put his family in my situation, his mother, his sisters, I told him that he would not want this to happen to them,” she said in court Wednesday.
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“He got off of me and just looked at me.”
“He gave me his hand and told me that he did not want to harm me but that he only wanted to show me that danger exists and that he wanted me to know it. He showed me some identification but because of the panic that I felt, all I wanted was for him to leave. I begged him to leave if he really wanted to help me. He began to walk and I did not see him again, “ she said.
Another victim, identified as “Carrie”, was attacked when she was hiking on September 27, 2004. “On that day, it wasn’t just the fear of being raped but it was the fear for my life,” she said.
“In the beginning, I couldn’t even consider going for my beloved hikes,” she said. “At present I am able of going alone if I am armed and if someone knows where I am and when my scheduled return time will be.”
Salazar, a Mexican national, had been deported ten times before his arrest in 2008.
