Advertisement

Man gets life without parole for kidnapping and sexually assaulting Northridge girl

Tobias Summers sits in court before his guilty verdict in a girl's kidnapping and sexual assault is read in Los Angeles County Superior Court last month.

Tobias Summers sits in court before his guilty verdict in a girl’s kidnapping and sexual assault is read in Los Angeles County Superior Court last month.

(Nick Ut / Associated Press)
Share

The 10-year-old girl was snatched from her bed in Northridge at knife point. The stranger bundled her into a waiting car. She was tied up and gagged.

Over the next 12 hours, her attacker tied a belt around her neck as he repeatedly sexually assaulted her inside the car and later at a storage yard, a vacant home and a drainage tunnel as they crossed the San Fernando Valley.

On Thursday, the girl, now 13, told a judge that her kidnapper should never be free.

“It was not right, and no one should ever have to go through that ever,” she said in a halting voice. “So I hope he goes away forever.”

Advertisement

Calling the victim one of the bravest young women he had seen, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Ronald S. Coen sentenced her attacker, Tobias Summers, to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The judge added multiple terms of 15 years to life, describing Summers as a predator.

A jury convicted Summers, 34, last month of more than 30 felony counts, including kidnapping to commit rape, forcible lewd acts and aggravated sexual assault, in connection with the March 2013 attack.

Jurors heard evidence that Summers and another man, Daniel Martinez, chose the girl’s home at random for a burglary. Martinez was waiting in the getaway car when Summers emerged from the home with the girl, prosecutors said. After driving a short distance, Martinez ditched the car, Summers and the girl.

The victim’s mother, hearing noises in the home, discovered that her daughter’s bed was empty and frantically dialed 911.

In a highly publicized search, police found the girl wandering in a Woodland Hills parking lot barefoot and bruised. She was wearing different clothes from the ones she had worn to bed.

Martinez was eventually caught and convicted of burglary. He was sentenced to six years in prison for his role in the incident.

Advertisement

Los Angeles police detectives found Summers a month after the kidnapping at a rehab facility 200 miles south of the border in Mexico. Summers had entered the facility under a fake name, but a Superman logo tattooed on his chest gave him away.

During the trial, Summers told jurors that someone else had assaulted the girl and he had saved her.

“She looked like a little version of my mom,” he testified, according to KCBS.

But prosecutors noted that DNA found on the victim’s shorts was consistent with Summers’ genetic profile and argued that he tried to wash his DNA off the girl in the vacant home he took her to.

The girl’s father told the judge on Thursday that his daughter had insisted on addressing the court during the sentencing hearing.

“The word ‘victim,’ by definition, defines my daughter,” he said. “But she is much more than that. She is a survivor. She survived what this monster did.”

For breaking California news, follow @JosephSerna on Twitter.

ALSO:

Advertisement

El Rancho High School in Pico Rivera locked down after student makes gun threat

Deaths of man, woman, child in Downey investigated as murder-suicide

Shigella outbreak linked to San Jose restaurant spreads to other Bay Area counties

Advertisement