OXNARD : Man Gets Reduced Term in Gang Rape

A man who helped send one murderer to death row and another to prison for the rest of his life was given a much-reduced sentence on Friday for his role in an unrelated Oxnard gang rape, a crime the judge called one of the worst he had ever seen.

Superior Court Judge Lawrence Storch sentenced Bobby A. Rollins to 20 years in prison for the 1991 rape and a 1992 armed robbery, as part of a plea agreement proposed by prosecutors.

But the judge appeared reluctant to impose the sentence, saying he would have preferred to give Rollins something closer to the 50-year maximum he would have faced if he had not agreed to testify against the two murderers.

“I’m merely indicating from my own point of view that it’s unfortunate that his testimony was needed,” Storch said.

Rollins, 24, of Long Beach was a key witness in the trials of Oxnard residents Christopher Sattiewhite and Frederick Lee Jackson, who were convicted of murder in the January, 1992, slaying of Genoveva Gonzales of Oxnard.

Sattiewhite, who actually shot Gonzales, is now on Death Row. Jackson, who raped Gonzales and ordered her death, was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Four months earlier, all three men participated in the armed robbery of a man and woman on an Oxnard beach. In that September, 1991, crime, the woman was raped by two of the defendants and sexually assaulted by the third. And in November, 1992, Rollins robbed a couple sitting in their car on an Oxnard street.

Rollins was not charged in the Gonzales murder. He testified that he drove up just as the unconscious Gonzales was being taken from Jackson’s car by Sattiewhite, who seconds later shot her three times in the face and left her body in a drainage ditch along Arnold Road in Oxnard.

During Jackson’s murder trial, Rollins was described by Deputy Dist. Atty. Donald C. Glynn as a “vile human being,” but the prosecutor insisted the murder would not have been solved without him.