Man Who Kidnapped And Raped 6-Year-Old OC Girl Caught With Groundbreaking Use Of DNA

ORANGE COUNTY, CA — A SoCal man was convicted this week of kidnapping and raping a 6-year-old girl more than a decade ago in a ground-breaking Orange County case. The conviction of child rapist Francisco Javier Lopez, 51, marks the first time the county has used a woman’s DNA to identify a male-related suspect, and only the second time it's been done in California.

The case had gone cold before advancements in DNA testing.

Lopez, of Montebello, was convicted of sexually assaulting the girl after spotting her in a Santa Ana neighborhood in 2012, according to court records.

He was implicated due to improved DNA testing, which resulted in his cold case arrest when scientists in the state's crime laboratory were able to search for DNA connections to female defendants in 2018, The Orange County Register reported.

According to the report, familial DNA markers up until then were limited to male defendants, but the change led them to a match with a "close relative" of Lopez.

He faced a dozen felonies, including:

• 1 felony count of kidnapping to commit a sex offense.
• 1 felony count of oral copulation of a child under the age of 11.
• 3 felony counts of sexual penetration of a child under the age of 11.
• 1 felony count of sexual intercourse with a child under the age of 11.
• 5 felony counts of a forcible lewd and lascivious act with a child under the age of 14.

The victim, an unidentified 6-year-old girl, was playing with a 4-year-old boy in front of her home in the 1400 block of South Townsend during the day when a man lured her into his car in July 2012.

According to Santa Ana Police Department Chief David Valentin, Lopez took her to a parking lot, "brutally sexually assaulted her," and then "essentially dumped her out of the vehicle" in the neighborhood he had abducted her from.

There were clues left behind, beyond a description of the vehicle used in the abduction, a general description of the suspect that was used to create a sketch of the man, and DNA recovered from the crime scene, according to a 2012 report by The Orange County Register. Unbeknownst to investigators, Lopez reportedly lived in the same apartment complex as the child, but he was not known to her family.

The DNA was submitted to a state database, but there were no immediate hits.

In 2014, a woman related to Lopez was convicted of an unrelated crime in Orange County and her DNA samples were sent both to a local DNA database and the statewide system, Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer said.

Lopez faces up to life in prison without the possibility of parole.