Police free abducted woman

A 20-year-old woman who said she had been abducted by her ex-boyfriend, locked in a room and repeatedly raped for more than two weeks was rescued Friday night, three days after she made the first in a series of cellphone calls for help, police said Saturday.

Police arrested the woman’s ex-boyfriend, Mario Menas, 35, about 9 p.m. Friday on suspicion of kidnapping, assault with a deadly weapon, rape by force and false imprisonment.

Police found the woman in a dilapidated banquet hall in South Los Angeles where Menas had been living, Det. Andrew Serrata said.

Although the woman was reported missing by her current boyfriend on April 16, a break in the case did not come until she began making cellphone calls for help 13 days later.

Investigators got a tip that Menas worked at an area carwash and spent days searching nearby cities for him, assisted by her current boyfriend.

They found Menas on Friday at a carwash in the 3000 block of Gage Avenue in Huntington Park and followed him to the banquet hall near Slauson Avenue and Mettler Street in South L.A. Once there, they found the woman locked in a small room.

“She was very visibly shaken. She was very traumatized by the events,” Frank Hauptmann, interim chief of the Maywood-Cudahy Police Department, said Saturday at a news conference.

The woman came here illegally from Honduras with Menas about a year ago, and the two broke up in January, police said.

Authorities said she did not contact police directly, in part out of fear that she would be deported.

“She was really scared and didn’t want to call 911 . . . worried that she would be sent back,” Serrata said.

Instead, she made a series of brief cellphone calls -- mostly 30 seconds or less -- when her ex-boyfriend left a cellphone behind during trips to the bathroom.

“She was in fear, but she could not maintain these phone calls for a very long time,” Hauptmann said.

Most of the time, she was locked in a 12- by 12-foot room, police said. However, she said she had left the building with Menas more than once, going to a market and other nearby locations. She told police she was too frightened to seek help during those outings because Menas had threatened to kill her friends and family members.

“She felt it would be best to suffer the ramifications herself” than put others in harm’s way, Hauptmann said.

In the calls she made for help, she was unable to describe where she was being held in detail, telling her boyfriend only that she believed she was near Maywood and could see a yellow building from a small window.

Hauptmann said the case underscored the need for local law enforcement to gain and keep the trust of residents, regardless of their immigration status.

“Without that trust, the community would roil out of control and the gangbangers would basically take over,” Hauptmann said. “My job is not to seek out undocumented immigrants and arrest them. . . . In this police department, we don’t want anyone to have that fear.”

In 2006, city leaders made statements calling Maywood a “sanctuary city” for illegal immigrants. Maywood, in southeast Los Angeles County, has an official population of about 28,000, but local officials have said that about 45,000 people live there when illegal immigrants are counted.

Authorities said the woman told them that Menas had previously abducted and physically abused her, but she did not report him.

“Domestic violence is a very great problem in our community,” said Maywood Mayor Felipe Aguirre. “There’s fear. There’s intimidation.”

Authorities said Menas has several aliases but no history of arrests in the United States. He is being held on $101,588 bail, according to Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department jail records.

The woman was taken to a hospital to be evaluated and was discharged Saturday morning, officials said.

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ron.lin@latimes.com