SOLEDAD — Former Soledad resident Ramon Rangel Mendoza, 60, was sentenced to 25 years in the state prison after he pleaded no contest to three felony counts of lewd and lascivious acts with a child under 14 years old, involving force or duress.
In December 2019, 14-year old Jane Doe disclosed to her mother that Mendoza, a family friend and former roommate, had molested her when she was about 7 to 9 years old.
After reporting it to law enforcement, Doe disclosed that Mendoza forced her to “orally copulate him more than a dozen times” over the course of two years at the Soledad homes her family shared with him, from 2012 to 2015, police said.
With the assistance of Doe’s family, local police created a Facebook account for Doe and contacted Mendoza through it, pretending to be Doe.
Over the course of multiple days, Mendoza admitted to molesting Doe and even reminisced in detail as to the ways he sexually abused her and how much he missed doing it. By the end of the conversation, he was attempting to meet her at a hotel in Paso Robles to have another sexual encounter, police said.
Mendoza was arrested in the city of Coachella in January 2020.
At the Feb. 4 sentencing hearing, Doe and her mother both gave victim impacts statements and talked about how horribly the abuse has affected Doe.
Mendoza will be forced to register as a sex offender for life. Due to recent amendments in California Law, he will be eligible for elder parole after serving only 20 years of his sentence.
