5 Held in O.C. Canyon Rapes, Beatings

Two suspects arrested in the brutal attack on two teenage girls and their boyfriends in a remote Orange County canyon said in jailhouse interviews Monday that the July 3 crime was unplanned and followed an evening of drinking, drugs and vandalism.

Erick Oswaldo Dominguez of Anaheim and Cuahutemoc Torres of Orange, both 19, said they regret the rapes of the two girls and the beatings of their boyfriends in rugged Black Star Canyon.

The two men, along with one 16-year-old and two 15-year-olds, were taken into custody over the weekend, sheriff’s officials announced Monday.

Dominguez and Torres told The Times they first vandalized the teens’ car, drove off and decided to return for CDs they’d spotted. They were met by the two girls, ages 13 and 15, and their boyfriends, ages 16 and 17, who unwittingly sought the suspects’ help in fixing the damaged car.

“I’d like to say I’m really sorry from the bottom of my heart,” said Dominguez, who also goes by the name Eric Rivera.

The account provided by Dominguez and Torres could not be corroborated independently. But Orange County sheriff’s officials said Monday that the girls were repeatedly raped before they were dumped in an isolated area of the canyon. Terrified and naked, the girls wandered through the scrub, covering themselves in rags and cardboard they found along the way, until they reached a road and sought help from a passing ambulance.

The girls’ boyfriends were kicked in the head and beaten with a rock. The 17-year-old boy suffered a fractured skull and spent days unconscious in a hospital. Sheriff’s officials said Monday that he has since recovered and is home. The girls were treated at an area hospital, then released.

All of the victims’ names have been withheld.

The three younger suspects in custody were not identified because of their ages, but sheriff’s officials said all three live in Anaheim. Officials said they believe the five are members or associates of an Orange-based gang that began as a “tagging,” or graffiti, crew in 1993, and has grown to about 25 to 30 members. Orange Police Sgt. Dave Hill said the gang was linked to an attempted murder in March.

It was the gang moniker freshly scrawled at the scene of the rape, spotted by a deputy Friday, that led detectives to arrest the five suspects, authorities said Monday.

The five suspects are believed to be members or associates of Los Traviesos Krew, loosely translated as The Mischievous Ones--whose initials, LTK--were spotted on a gate leading to the desolate area.

Dominguez said he raped one of the girls, but stopped when she told him she was only 13. As others sexually assaulted her 15-year-old friend, the younger girl begged Dominguez not to kill her, he said, and asked for a kiss on the cheek as a promise that he would let her live.

“I know that she’ll never forgive me,” said Dominguez, clad in a yellow jumpsuit as he spoke via telephone through a glass partition. “It all seemed like a fantasy--not a fantasy, just a dream.”

Torres said through tears that he did not take part in the sexual assaults and denied being in a gang. But he added that he feels overwhelming remorse for his role in the attack.

“I’m sick to my stomach,” he said. “I wish I could go back and change everything.”

He said that as the attack unfolded, he wished he could leave. “The thing that kept running through my mind was why didn’t I stop them [from raping the girls]? It was horrible.”

Chance Encounter, Then Out of Control

The assault marked a rare episode of serious violence in the rugged hills just east of Orange, which at night attracts a mix of hikers, drinkers and couples looking for a romantic hideaway.

For the two couples, the night of July 2 began as a secret rendezvous with the promise of some harmless teenage flirting. The boys slipped out of their Mission Viejo homes and met the girls, both of whom live in Tustin.

Just a few miles away, Erick Dominguez also was preparing himself for a night out by taking crystal methamphetamine and smoking marijuana at his Anaheim home. Dominguez said he was trying to leave gang life behind and wanted to join the Army. But that night, he said, he wanted to hang out with his friends.

Feeling high, Dominguez said, he drove to his friends’ homes in Anaheim and Orange, then drove them to the canyon. Every weekend, he said, the group ventured up Black Star Canyon Road to drink and smoke weed.

He parked his white Toyota Corolla at the end, and they walked into the brush to smoke marijuana and drink hard liquor. When they returned, Dominguez said, he and his friends noticed a red Mazda parked nearby. They decided to vandalize the car for fun. They shattered the windshield and tore up the car’s inside, then drove away.

As the group left, someone realized that they had forgotten to steal the CDs in the Mazda and they doubled back. When they arrived back at the car, they saw the couples walking back to the Mazda.

One of the boyfriends wanted to break out the windshield so he could see out front, and he asked Dominguez and his group for help. Dominguez said the next thing he remembers is one of the boyfriends rushing at him, as if to attack.

Dominguez said he caught the boy in a chokehold and dropped him to the ground. His friends joined in. Dominguez said he watched as one smashed the other boy’s head with a rock. Meanwhile, Dominguez said, he dragged the youngest girl next to his car and raped her.

“She told me, ‘I’m only 13 years old,’ ” Dominguez recalled. “And she kept asking if I was going to kill her. I told her, ‘No, I’m not going to kill you. Just don’t look at my face.’ She told me to kiss her on her cheek. And I asked, ‘Why?,’ and she said, ‘As a promise you won’t kill me.’ ”

Dominguez said he asked himself why he was raping her and realized he had gone too far. He said he stopped. Next to him, the other girl was being raped, though Dominguez refused to identify who attacked her.

Dominguez and the others, he said, drove the girls in his car to a nearby ditch. They threw the girls into the ditch and separated them.

“The 13-year-old kept asking, she said, ‘I’m scared, can I just hold my friend’s hand?’ ” Dominguez said. “I felt sick. I didn’t want to be there anymore.”

Meanwhile, Torres said he had driven the victims’ car down toward the ditch but a tire blew and the vehicle spun out of control and into a fence. “I was scared to death,” he said.

‘I Can’t Believe We Just Did That’

The tagging crew regrouped, and suddenly someone shouted, “Let’s go! Let’s go!” They headed out, leaving the girls behind.

“On the way home, we talked about it,” Dominguez said, adding that he told his friends, “I can’t believe we just did that. Keep your mouths shut and act like nothing happened.”

As news of the brutal attack spread, tips poured into the Sheriff’s Department. An anonymous donor offered $25,000 for information leading to an arrest. But none of the leads helped. Detectives acknowledge they were baffled--until someone scrawled the letters “LTK” on the gate just yards from the crime scene.

Sheriff Mike Carona said in a news conference Monday that investigators believed at least one of the suspects had returned to the scene of the crime to mark the gang’s territory. Without realizing it, whoever wrote the initials had provided a crucial piece of evidence, Carona said.

“It shows that they’re not very bright . . . and it shows they’re pretty brazen,” Carona said. “Leaving their motif is partly bragging rights.”

A patrol deputy, whose name was not released, was scouting out the area in the wake of the attack when she noticed the new graffiti and alerted sex crimes detectives. Detectives, who had few leads up to then, asked other agencies for help in identifying the initials.

Orange police recognized the gang moniker. And by late Saturday, deputies had arrested all five. The 1987 Toyota hatchback Dominguez was driving when arrested matched the description of the vehicle given by the victims, even down to the one headlight being dimmer than the other, officials said.

In interrogations, two of the juveniles admitted to robbing and beating the victims but denied raping the girls, officials said. They said all five suspects made incriminating statements, but deputies refused to give details.

The victims identified the five suspects at lineups, officials said. And palm prints taken from the victims’ car also match two of the suspects, authorities said.

Police said Dominguez was convicted earlier this year of leading police on a high-speed chase last summer. Torres pleaded guilty in February to receiving stolen property and was named in court records by probation officials as a suspect in a March 27 shooting in Orange.

A spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office said prosecutors will decide by Wednesday whether to charge the three juvenile suspects. The two adults are being held on probation violations, giving authorities more time to decide how to proceed against them.