Victims Testify in Highway Sex Assault Trial

With the emotional words of a victim, testimony began Thursday in the trial of an El Rio man accused of attacking three women and raping a fourth after ramming his truck into their cars.

Silverio Ambriz, 31, is charged with 14 felony offenses, including rape, kidnapping for sexual purposes, sexual battery, robbery and deadly assault.

The alleged assaults--which prosecutors say began with bumping one woman’s car and quickly escalated to running another woman off the road to rape her--all occurred Nov. 29, 1996, along a stretch of California 118 near Camarillo.

On Thursday, Deputy Dist. Atty. Jacqueline Wise told a judge in opening statements that evidence will show beyond a reasonable doubt that Ambriz was the man who committed the string of crimes.

DNA tests positively identify Ambriz as the rapist, Wise said. And hard evidence such as tire tracks and positive identification by more than one victim connect Ambriz to the attacks, she said.

But in his opening remarks, Deputy Public Defender Gary Windom told the court that his client was wrongly accused.

Windom told Superior Court Judge Allan L. Steele, who is hearing the case instead of a jury, that Ambriz was home in bed at the time of the assaults after a Thanksgiving celebration with his family.

“We intend to show, your honor, that the events that occurred . . . could not have been done by the defendant because he was at home,” Windom said.

After opening statements, Wise called her first two witnesses--women who said their cars were rammed by a big, white Ford truck after midnight as they were driving home from Thanksgiving Day festivities in Camarillo.

The first woman, a Simi Valley resident, testified that she and her sister were following each other on California 118 when a white truck traveling at high speed swerved between their cars.

The woman said that when she reached Moorpark, the man in the truck rammed the back of her car. She had earlier written down the license-plate number of the truck and went to the police, she said.

Later in the day, a second victim took the stand. In a quaking, emotional voice, she recalled that after visiting two bars in Camarillo on her way home, she stopped at a traffic light on Los Posas Road next to a Latino man in a white truck, and made eye contact with him.

She testified that moments later, the man in the truck rammed her car three times, causing her to run a stop sign and speed off to get away.

“I just wanted to get to the nearest gas station--somewhere it was light,” she testified Thursday.

At one point, the woman identified Ambriz, seated at the defense table in a dark, pinstriped suit, as the driver of the truck.

But on cross-examination, she also acknowledged that a day after the assault, she was unable to describe the suspect in the same detail she now remembers after seeing newspaper articles and pictures of Ambriz.

The other two victims are expected to take the stand today.

In the most serious charge, authorities say Ambriz rammed his truck into the back of an 18-year-old woman’s car, forcing it to overturn. He allegedly pulled her from the wreckage and raped her in a nearby orchard.

A 24-year-old woman also told authorities that a man in a large, white truck rammed her car twice after midnight while she was driving westbound on California 118.

When she got out to inspect the damage, she told authorities, a man jumped out of the truck and tried to sexually assault her.