Santos Javier Guevara Oliva was found guilty of aggravated sexual assault of a child under 14 years of age and forcible rape and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole the first non-murder case to receive such a sentence in Santa Barbara County history.
Oliva impregnated the daughter of his current girlfriend and both she and another girl Oliva raped in 2008 testified at his trial.
Oliva had fled the area when he learned he was to be questioned about the crimes, and Santa Barbara County sheriff’s detectives discovered Oliva was staying at a relative’s home in Hyattsville, Md., where he was arrested on Feb. 25 by federal immigration officers.
ICE stated that Oliva is a citizen of El Salvador and was deported from the United States as an aggravated felon in December 2010.
Oliva was convicted of grand theft and false imprisonment in Santa Barbara in 2009 and was sentenced to two years in prison.
However, at an unknown place and time, he illegally re-entered the United States and took up residence in Carpinteria, law enforcement officials said.
The testimony at Oliva’s trial was heartbreaking.
Both the girl who had become pregnant, who is 15 now, as well as the second victim who was molested by Oliva took the stand to describe their abuse.
Deputy District Attorney Benjamin Ladinig, who handles many of the sex-crime cases the DA’s office prosecutes, said that most cases he deals with do not involve child rape, but rare cases do exist that involve such extreme crimes against children.
“This is that case,” he told the jurors. “You don’t think that this stuff can happen. You think in Santa Barbara it can’t touch us here, but it does and it has.”
Both girls were in middle school at the time they were sexually assaulted by their stepfather, he said, and were not fully aware of what had been done to them.
“These girls had their souls crushed. … They had their childhood shattered,” he said.
