Culver City resident Samuel Duran, 36, was sentenced to 24 years in state prison on Tuesday, Sept. 19, for keeping a 15-year-old girl with autism in his home and sexually assaulting her.
According to KTLA, the girl was kept a prisoner in Duran’s home for weeks during the spring of 2015 after she disappeared from her Mar Vista home in the March of that year.
Duran pleaded no contest to three counts of “forcible oral copulation with a victim over 14-years-old,” and he was charged on Tuesday.
KTLA said that the girl was found by police on April 13, 2015, three weeks after she disappeared, after she managed to make a phone call that las enforcement was able to trace.
“The police actually got her,” her mother told KTLA. “They had to go in the house and physically get her.”
That call led to the girl being reunited with her mother.
“She’s been through a lot and life will never be the same,” her mother said.
Her mother also told KTLA that, due to her autism, the girl has the mental capacity of an eight-year-old and is very trusting. She was also without her medication and her own cellphone when she left her home for a walk near the Mar Vista Recreation Center that morning.
Along with the 24-year sentence, Duran must register as a lifetime sexual offender.