NBC 7’s Liberty Zabala reports from the neighborhood where two women were randomly attacked in the middle of the night. One woman died from her injuries. The other was hospitalized with multiple stab wounds, police said.
The man accused of killing one woman and injuring another in an attack in their own home has a violent criminal past.
Eduardo Torres, 20, of San Diego, held two woman captive for at least 15 minutes at their home on Mill Peak Road at 11:30 p.m. Sunday, located west of College Avenue and north of Interstate 8 in the Del Cerro neighborhood, San Diego Police Department (SDPD) Lt. Manuel Del Toro said.
Torres allegedly tried to break into home home nearby, but residents scared him off.
It was then that he broke into a second home. Inside, were a 74-year-old woman and another woman in her 50s, police said.
Torres sexually assaulted the women at knife point, according to police.
When officers arrived, they could hear loud screams from inside the home.
SWAT officers immediately set up a perimeter outside the home and pinpointed the suspect and hostages in a locked bedroom.
"The difficulty with this type case is you had to balance the urgency of the females in distress, but you also had a potentially barricaded hostage type situation which could have turned very violent. They had to do so tactically because the threat was that he had a gun and he was going to kill the people in there," Toro said.
When officers entered the locked bedroom the suspect dropped a knife and surrendered to police. Police have not recovered any other weapons, including the gun the suspect claimed he had.
Torres was arrested and removed from the home in handcuffs. He is facing homicide, sexual assault and burglary charges, Toro said.
NBC 7 San Diego has learned Torres was arrested in the Chollas Creek area on a prior assault and vandalism charge, but pleaded it down to a misdemeanor vandalism conviction.
The older victim died from stab wounds, according to Lt. Toro. She was described as the resident of the home. The second victim - a Chicago woman who was visiting San Diego - suffered stab wounds to her upper body, police said.
A 56-year-old man escaped the home unharmed, police said.
No other information was immediately available.
