BY NATANYA FRIEDHEIM
Daily Post Correspondent
A judge has sentenced a man to life in prison without parole for kidnapping and sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl who was jogging on a path near Stanford Research Park in Palo Alto in 2018.
Eduardo Antonio Chavarria-Diaz, 38, received additional sentences Friday (Oct. 23) for robbing and assaulting a 32-year-old woman in Oakland three weeks prior to the Palo Alto assault.
In July, he was found guilty of six felonies for sexual assault, kidnapping and robbery following a trial. He waived the right to a jury trial and the case was decided by a judge.
“Mr. Chavarria-Diaz represents a significant danger to the community and the appropriate sentence is one that will disable him from being able to attack other victims,” Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Luis Ramos said before announcing his sentence.
The teenager in Palo Alto, referred to as Jane Doe #1 in the case, was running with her track team on a path at Arastradero and Deer Creek roads, on March 28, 2018.
Chavarria-Diaz grabbed the girl by her arm and pulled her into a wooded area. He threatened to shoot her if she made noise and bound her with duct tape, then took off her clothes and digitally penetrated her, police said at the time.
After he ran away, the girl flagged down a bystander to call police. She was taken to Stanford Hospital and police began a manhunt.
At Martin Luther King Jr. Regional Shoreline park in Oakland on March 4, 2018, Chavarria-Diaz robbed a woman referred to in the case as Jane Doe #2.
He demanded she give him her cash and checkbook, then kissed, licked and groped her while wielding what appeared to be a gun.
DNA collected in both assaults matched. Police arrested Chavarria-Diaz at his apartment in Richmond on April 8, 2018. He had a BB gun that looked like a pistol in his car, police said.
Neither woman spoke at the sentencing hearing on Friday.
“I thought the judge made the right decision, I thought the conduct in this case was extremely serious, extremely dangerous and what the judge did was necessary to protect the community,” Daniel Rothbach, deputy district attorney with the Santa Clara District Attorney’s Office, said in an interview after the sentencing.
At the hearing, Deputy Alternate Defender Karri Iyama, who represented Chavarria-Diaz, acknowledged the severity of the crimes but argued for a lesser sentence, saying that people who commit crimes that could be considered more severe have gotten more lenient sentencing than what her client received.
“There has to be a balancing and a consideration of the conduct in this case (…) in relation to the other cases,” she said. Chavarria-Diaz has been in jail since his arrest.
The case took unusually long to resolve. The original trial date in 2019 was pushed to March 2020 because Chavarria-Diaz’s attorney had another case and could not do both at the same time, Rothbach said.
The Covid pandemic and shutdown disrupted the rescheduled trial, then prosecutors had to accommodate the schedule of the victim in the Palo Alto assault, who was then a college student.
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