Police: Sexual Reason for Girl's Abduction

June 9, 2003 -- Police are planning to charge the suspect in the violent abduction of a 9-year-old girl from her San Jose, Calif., home with sexual assault, authorities said today.

Assistant Chief Thomas Wheatley of the San Jose Police Department told The Associated Press that the kidnapping, which was recorded by a neighbor's surveillance video camera, appeared to be a sexual abduction and that police have physical evidence of a sexual assault.

The suspect, David Montiel Cruz, is also being booked on suspicion of kidnapping, burglary, robbery, and assault with a deadly weapon, Wheatley added.

Police arrested Cruz today in a predawn raid at the home of a friend, just eight hours after he apparently released the girl on Sunday night, and less than a mile from her home.

The suspect tried to fight off officers and was taken to the hospital after a police dog bit him, police Sgt. Steve Dixon told the AP.

Cruz fits the description given by the kidnapped girl and her mother and brother, both of whom fought with the kidnapper, San Jose police Chief William Lansdowne said.

The suspect also has injuries that match those that the girl's mother said she inflicted on the kidnapper, and has a vehicle that looks like the one the kidnapper was seen driving in a neighbor's surveillance video that recorded the abduction, he said.

"We're very confident this is the right person," Lansdowne said.

The chief investigator in the case, Deputy Chief Rob Davis, confirmed what police had said they believed all along — that the abduction was not random.

"There is a link through the children," Davis said. "The victim has a friend who is related to somebody who knows the suspect."

The girl was the subject of a statewide Amber Alert after she was kidnapped from her San Jose home on Friday. She walked into an East Palo Alto convenience store Sunday night and told the store owner that she was in trouble. He called police.

Isa Yasin, the owner of the shop, said he did not see anyone drop off the girl. "She was crying and scared," Yasin said.

Quality Evidence

While the tape did not give police a clear look at the suspect himself, it did provide them with a minute-by-minute record of the crime.

"You rarely have that type of a quality piece of evidence at the front end of your investigation," Davis said on ABCNEWS' Good Morning America. "Usually in a case like this you find that the victims can't give you a good time sequence of what happened and when.

"Because we had that tape, we knew when the suspect was coming, when the suspect was going and how much time he had spent in each of these phases at the front end of the crime," he added. "It's very rare to get something like that and very valuable."

The girl was abducted Friday after she returned home from school. The grainy black and white video shows the suspect lying in wait for the little girl for nearly two hours.

"The tape makes it very clear that he was targeting this house," Dixon said. "He wasn't roaming the neighborhood looking for houses to break into. He was there for quite some time, just waiting for this little girl to come home."

Before the girl arrived home, he pulled up his car in front of the house and went inside. Police believe he may have slipped in through a broken window at the rear of the house.

Then, after about 25 minutes inside the house, the suspect is seen returning to his car.

At one point another car drives past, then backs up and lingers next to the suspect's car. Police said they were looking for the driver of that car but, would not speculate on whether the driver might have been an accomplice.

"We know that that car was pulled up alongside the suspect's vehicle for about 12 seconds," Davis said. "We don't know if somebody was asking for directions or what the issue is, but we have enough leads where we feel we can find out what happened as a result of that connection."

Shortly thereafter, at approximately 4:20 p.m., the girl arrived home.

Family Arrives Home

The suspect was inside the home for another 25 minutes, then came back out and backed his car into the garage.

Around the same time, the girl's mother, aunt and 15-year-old brother drive up to the house. The aunt is seen getting out and driving away in a separate car.

The brother is seen going into the house by crawling underneath the garage door. Police say he was attacked and choked by the man inside.

The girl's mother is seen on the tape running in to help her son, but police say that the man inside started beating her with pans and a ladder. As the man inside was beating her, he twice told her, "You know what I want," the AP reported. Both the mother and son suffered serious injuries.

Both mother and son are then seen screaming and running to neighbor's homes for help on the video, as the suspect pulls out of the driveway in his car with the girl inside.

Neighbors in the middle class neighborhood were stunned about what happened on their quiet street. Malavuy Kumar was seen on the videotape playing basketball with his son as the suspect sat in his car nearby.

"It's very, very scary for our neighborhood," Kumar said. "It's a quiet neighborhood."

Neighborhood children are scared, too.

"You see these things on TV far away but you never think they would happen like close to home," said Michael Barife, a boy who lives in the neighborhood. "It's like too close to my comfort."

After news that the girl was safe Sunday night, residents poured into the streets of the neighborhood to hug and celebrate.

"It was just like a Hollywood script," neighbor Karen Kamfolt, whose surveillance cameras recorded the kidnapping, told The Associated Press. "People came from all directions out of their houses."

"It's a wonderful ending to a horrible nightmare," she said.

ABCNEWS' Steffan Tubbs and Bill Redeker and ABCNEWS.com's Dean Schabner contributed to this report.