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Controversial Sweep Nets Arrest of Suspect in Rape of Poway Girl

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Times Staff Writer

San Diego County sheriffs deputies arrested a suspect Friday in the Sunday-evening rape of a 15-year-old Poway girl that sparked a controversial law enforcement dragnet aimed at Latino migrant workers in a rural Poway neighborhood.

Leonardo Cedillo Martinez, 24, was arrested without incident at 6 p.m. in a trailer situated in a field off Agsten Road in Poway, said Sgt. Stephen Wood of the San Diego County Sheriffs Department’s Poway station.

Cedillo Martinez, an illegal alien, was booked on suspicion of rape and rape with a foreign object. He was being held in the County Jail downtown, Wood said.

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The arrest came five days after a 15-year-old Poway girl told sheriffs that she was pulled off a horse and raped behind a small market after a group of eight men and a woman blocked her path.

Armed with the victim’s description of her attacker, 27 deputies--including 17 members of the department’s special enforcement SWAT team--and 12 U.S. Border Patrol agents descended on a rural neighborhood along Midland Road on Monday, detaining and questioning 83 Latino men. Six more were questioned Tuesday and Wednesday.

Despite heavy criticism from civil-rights groups that a law enforcement sweep based on skin color and ancestry was unconstitutional, a sheriff said Friday that the move was justified.

Cedillo Martinez “was identified as a result of the sweep the other night, so we feel it was well-justified what we did,” said Sgt. Doug Walters, a patrol officer with the Sheriff’s Department’s Poway station. Sympathetic members of the area’s Latino community provided “leads and information” that led to the arrest, he said.

Walters said investigators know the identity of the man who helped pull the teen-ager off her horse and held her down during the rape, and expect to arrest him. No charges can be brought against the onlookers who did not intervene in the attack, which he said lasted only a few minutes.

Walters refused to provide details of the charge of rape with a foreign object, which had not been reported in earlier police descriptions of the incident.

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The girl, who apparently did not know her attackers, appears to be the victim of a random, unplanned assault in a spot popular with Poway horseback riders, Walters said.

“I think it was crime of opportunity,” he Walters said. “They all came together at the same place at the same time, and it spontaneously occurred.” There is no evidence to suggest that the group had been drinking, he said.

Cedillo Martinez has been in the United States illegally for about a year, working as a laborer, Walters said. By Friday night, authorities had not turned up any U.S. criminal record for him but had not checked with Mexican authorities, he said.

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