California woman found 10 years after alleged kidnapping by Isidro Garcia

A Califoia woman who was kidnapped a decade ago, sexually assaulted and forced to marry her abductor has escaped after contacting her sister on Facebook, police say.

The Santa Ana Police Department in southe Califoia said it is holding Isidro Garcia, 41, on charges connected with the abduction.

The victim, who has not been named, was 15 when she was allegedly kidnapped by Garcia in 2004.

Garcia was dating her mother and lived with the family, authorities said, in the Villa del Sol garden-apartment complex in Santa Ana, a largely middle-class, mostly Latino city in the inland part of Orange County, about an hour south of Los Angeles.

The mother suspected that he was sexually abusing her daughter, police said.

In June 2004, Garcia assaulted the mother, drugged the girl then fled with her to a house in Compton, ABC News US reports.

According to police Garcia initially imprisoned her in a garage then told her that her family had stopped looking for her and that they would be deported if she came forward.

He supplied her with false identification papers and forced her to marry him in 2007.

He subjected her to sustained physical, sexual and mental abuse over the years and the two had a child in 2012, according to police.

The victim, now 25, recently contacted her sister on Facebook “and eventually gained the courage to contact the police,” the statement said.

She told her story to officers on Tuesday, police said.

Garcia and the woman moved several times “to avoid police detection,” the police said.

They worked for the same cleaning service, holding down jobs on a night cleaning crew that he had arranged “so he could keep a close eye on the victim”.

Cpl. Anthony Bertagna, a spokesman for the Santa Ana police, told the KNX-AM radio station in Los Angeles that the girl had tried twice to get away, the New York Times reports.

“She was a 15-year-old girl in a new country,” he said.

“She’s been told by the suspect her family doesn’t want her, and this is all she’s got.”

The police said the family was originally from Mexico. They did not identify the victim or her mother.

But NPR radio cited neighbours as identifying the young woman as having the first name Laura, and said she was able to drive a car.

Neighbours described them leading an apparently normal life.

“He’s a good guy,” one neighbour told KTLA television when asked about Garcia.

“I see him every day, going to work, (saying) ‘Hi, how you been?’”

Garcia’s arrest comes just over a year after kidnapping and rape victims Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight, three women who’d gone missing separately about a decade earlier while in their teens or early 20s, were rescued from a house in Cleveland.

Their captor, Ariel Castro, hanged himself in prison in September 2013 at the beginning of a life sentence plus 1000 years.