Patricia Esparza: Rape Victim Gets Six Years For Identifying Rapist To The Man Who Murdered Him
Patricia Esparza, the California woman who identified her rapist to the man who would then go on to hack him to death with a meat cleaver, has been sentenced to six years in prison for her role in the murder, The New York Daily New is reporting.
Back in 1995, Esparza, at the time a college student, was raped, allegedly by Gonzalo Ramirez, a man she had met at a bar.
Esparza would later testify that later that night, she arrived at the shop and that Gries led her to Ramirez, who was alive but bloodied and dangling from a chain, arms suspended above his head. The next day, Ramirez’ body was found, blindfolded and wrapped in a blue cloth. He had been hacked to death with a meat cleaver, according to The Associated Press.
Police later arrested Van and charged him with the murder. However, prosecutors dropped their case after he and Esparza got married; that meant that Esparza could not be compelled to testify against him, and they had no case.
Over the next 17 years, police back in California kept up their investigation. Finally, in 2012, authorities arrested Esparza when she was visiting the U.S. and charged her with murder.
Esparza, meanwhile, continued to maintain her innocence. In a 2013 interview on The Today Show, Esparza claimed that she was pressured into a sham marriage in order to keep Van out of trouble and said that she was “dragged, pressured, bullied, intimidated” by Van.
“It just hurts me so much that I had been raped, and here he (Van) is, instead of consoling me, he destroyed the rest of my life. You know, the abuse was difficult, the rape was difficult, but dragging me through that night, it haunts me.”
She also claimed that rather than reporting her rape to the police, she was “shamed into silence” by a nurse at the campus health clinic where she had gone to get emergency contraception.
“I don’t think I was thinking at that time. I felt ashamed. I felt guilty. I didn’t want to come forward because I didn’t want my family to know.”
None of that mattered to Ramirez’ family. In a statement read to the court, one of Ramirez’ brothers recounted what must have been the last moments of Gonzalo’s life.
“It torments us to think of each stab, each hack and blow that he received while being tied without being able to defend himself.”
In 2014, Esparza took a plea deal that would allow her to plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter in exchange for her testimony against Van. Van has since been sentenced to life in prison, and he remains behind bars as of this writing. Co-defendant Shannon Gries was sentenced to 25 years in prison this week. Kody Tran, meanwhile, committed suicide.
This week, two years after pleading guilty, Esparza was sentenced to six years in prison for her role in Ramirez’ murder.
Her case has drawn criticism from rape survivors and sexual assault victims’ advocacy groups, who say that her sentence sends a “chilling message” to other rape survivors. Police, however, say that Esparza should have reported her rape to the police immediately rather than taking matters into her own hands.
[Photo by Amy Taxin/AP Images]
