A 25-year-old man was sentenced Friday to life in prison, with the possibility of parole in 7 years, for attempting to sexually assault a woman who was cleaning offices in Irvine after hours.
Eduardo Godoy González attacked the victim around 1:30 a.m. on February 6, 2019 in an office building at 17877 Von Karman.
“Frankly, it’s unbelievable that (the victim) was able to fight the defendant, with an empty bag on his back,” Orange County Superior Court Judge Terri K. Flynn-Peister said.
She also noted that the victim impact statement given in January showed she was “still traumatized by what happened to her”.
Gonzalez’s attorney, Randall Bethune of the Orange County Department of Public Defenders, argued that his client should be given a sentence other than life in prison because of his age at the time of 21 and the fact that he had no criminal record.
But Flynn-Peister said the “callousness of the crime” outweighed the mitigating factors in the case.
González was credited with 1,733 days in jail pending trial and ordered to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life.
Assistant District Attorney Jeffrey Boyd noted that the defendant was arrested for drug use in prison, which shows he learned nothing from his crime.
Gonzalez testified that he was high at the time of the attack, Boyd said.
Nathan Chasing Horse faces 19 criminal charges.
“It’s clear that the defendant behaved the same way he did here in the first place,” Boyd said.
Prosecutors said the victim, who worked as a janitor, confronted Gonzalez, who was carrying a skateboard. He asked her in Spanish, “Are you the only one here?”
The victim “didn’t know how to answer, so she asked if he worked there,” prosecutors said.
González replied, “I have condoms, take your clothes off,” prosecutors said. He also offered to pay the woman for sex, they added.
The victim pushed him away and said he had children, prompting him to pull out a fake gun and point it at her, prosecutors said. The woman begged him not to kill her because she was a mother.
“I don’t care, I’m going to kill you,” prosecutors said, to which González responded.
The defendant then grabbed her by the neck, pointed a gun at her, pushed her about 20 feet into a conference room, where the two fought for several minutes, prosecutors said.
As the victim screamed for help to get her supervisor’s attention, Gonzalez fell on an ottoman and dropped the gun, allowing the woman to run to the nearby office building to get some help, prosecutors said.
Security video captured the moment the suspect slammed a glass door to the building, and it was the object authorities used for DNA testing, prosecutors said.
Police then asked the public for help in identifying the suspect, which is when Gonzalez’s manager at Sprouts grocery store in Tustin called investigators and they identified him as the culprit, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors said that on January 13, 2019, González harassed another woman, offering to pay a woman so he could perform a sexual act on her, prosecutors said.
The woman said she was scared and sent him away, but when Gonzalez insisted, she changed tack” and asked him to walk with her until she reached a busy intersection, then walked away. exchanged phone numbers with him, prosecutors said He told her he worked at a grocery store, prosecutors said.
Gonzalez was convicted Dec. 5 of kidnapping with intent to commit a sex crime, assault with intent to commit a sex crime, criminal threats and robbery, all felonies and a misdemeanor for brandishing a replica weapon.