BY EMILY MIBACH
Daily Post Staff Writer
A brother and sister from Mountain View have been arrested for smuggling Guatemalan citizens to the city in order to exploit them in a labor adn sex trafficking scheme, police said yesterday (Dec. 29).
Carlos Garza, 33, sexually abused at least one teenage girl that he brought to Mountain View, and other men would pay him to have sex with the victim, according to police spokeswoman Katie Nelson.
Garza’s sister, Evelia De Maria Galvez, is suspected of threatening the girl in an attempt to dissuade her from going to authorities about the abuse.
Galvez is also accused of helping smuggle people into the United States from Guatemala. The brother and sister were arrested on Dec. 20.
Mountain View police started investigating the case in the first week of October. Officers responded to an apartment on the 1900 block of Latham Street to follow up on a report that a man had tried to sexually assault a teenage girl there.
Police had been at the home multiple times that week, once for a call about a man with a gun threatening to shoot a woman and a young boy, and a second time for a check on a possible victim of child abuse, according to Nelson.
While at the apartment on Oct. 4, police learned that several families — 12 people in all — lived in the two-bedroom apartment being rented by Garza, Nelson said.
Residents of the apartment told police that Garza helped numerous Guatemalans get to Mountain View, but once they made it to the area, he would intimidate, threaten and scare them so they would obey his every order, according to police.
Police believe that there are more people who have been abused or threatened by Garza and have asked that they contact Detective Marco Garcia at [email protected].
“Detectives are asking that anyone who may be a victim of either Garza or Galvez to come forward so that we can contact them and assist them. We want to ensure not only that every victim is safe, but that they are receiving victim services, outreach services and any additional assistance they may need,” Nelson said.
I’m glad Mountain View police got these two people off the streets, and I hope the people who were smuggled here from Guatamala are receiving the help they need. This must have been a traumatic experience, to say the least. It sounds like modern-day slavery. The story doesn’t explain why MV Police withheld information about these arrests for nine days (from December 20 to December 29). Do police in America arrest people secretly like they do in military dictatorships?
what a pair of low human wannabes to do this, it goes on so much as the news shows but harsher punishments are needed to get pos like this pair off the streets life in prison sounds great, lack of arrests is due to political correctness by reporters since they don’t like o report abuses by latinos and also the way these people cross the border in mexico they are also abused when aien smugglers payoff Mexican law enforcement which is never reported is directly involved all the time
The lag in reporting these arrests is kind of suspicious. Makes you think there’s something going on here that they’re not talking about. It’s better to be upfront than secretive when it comes to law enforcement.