Lara Starr had simply walked in by way of the door when she noticed a masked man holding a gun inside her Woodland Hills residence.
Starr assumed this was a part of a recreation referred to as Water Assassins that her son, a highschool senior, performed along with his classmates.
“It wasn’t completely uncommon for youths to be creeping round our home with large squirt weapons,” she mentioned.
Starr testified at a preliminary listening to Wednesday in a Van Nuys courtroom, the place she described a weird and disturbing sequence of occasions that started the afternoon of March 3.
She, her son and husband had been held captive by a person who pressured them right into a closet and boarded up the doorways with plywood. Starr and her partner testified that the person mentioned he meant to empty their retirement accounts. In the event that they resisted, he promised to burn down the home with them trapped inside.
The person finally charged with kidnapping, robbing and threatening her household turned out to be no stranger to Starr. However when she first noticed the individual standing in her hallway wearing a protracted sleeve white shirt, darkish pants, balaclava and blue latex gloves, she had no thought who he was.
One in every of her son’s pals had taken the squirt gun recreation too far, she thought. Pondering she’d name his bluff, she turned to stroll away.
One thing exhausting crashed into the again of her head. The intruder shoved her in opposition to a wall and threw her to the bottom.
“There was blood in all places,” she mentioned.
The intruder held out some zip ties. “Behave,” he mentioned.
Starr slipped the ties round her wrists, and the intruder cinched them tight.
He dragged Starr to her ft and zip tied her to a chair inside a walk-in closet hooked up to the master suite. She requested what he needed. Cash, he mentioned.
Starr informed him the place to seek out the keys to their protected, which held about $3,000 in money belonging to her in-laws, who’d been displaced by the Palisades hearth.
“Please,” she mentioned, “take the money and go.”
After dragging Starr’s son into the closet and zip tying him to a different chair, the intruder supplied to place a compress on her head, which was leaking blood.
He spoke in “a type of Japanese European accent,” Starr testified, however lapsed at instances into “different unidentified accents.” As they waited for her husband to return, the masked man rambled about himself.
He’d been smuggled by way of the “port of Atlanta” inside a transport container, he mentioned. Describing himself as a form of indentured servant, he mentioned he’d been “pressured to work in a legal enterprise, and if he didn’t, he could be killed,” Starr testified.
“He made a degree of claiming he knew quite a bit about us,” Starr recalled. The intruder mentioned he’d watched the household’s comings and goings by hacking right into a neighbor’s surveillance system that supplied a view of their driveway. He additionally, oddly, knew the names of the individuals who lived in the home earlier than Starr did.
Two hours crept by. Then Starr heard the sound of her husband punching within the code to their door and the click-clack of his biking sneakers on the ground.
“You may hear him strolling by way of the home, attempting to determine what was happening,” she testified.
The intruder pointed a gun on the bed room door, “ready for him to show the nook,” Starr mentioned.
Craig Didden testified he was met with a gun pointed at his face.
“Chill out,” the masked individual holding the gun mentioned.
That voice sounds acquainted, Didden recalled considering.
The intruder ordered Didden to ship emails to his and his spouse’s employers and his son’s college, explaining they’d be gone for the following few days. Didden testified that he tried his greatest to sort along with his wrists zip tied collectively whereas the person learn over his shoulder.
It will take 5 days to switch all the cash from their retirement accounts, the intruder informed the household.
“He mentioned he had quite a lot of instruments to get us to cooperate,” Starr testified, “however worst case-scenario, he’d go away us zip tied within the closet and burn the home down.”
When the suspect introduced them snacks — bananas, beef jerky and glowing water — Starr felt the ordeal had veered into the absurd. “It simply appeared so incongruous to zip tie somebody of their closet,” she mentioned, “after which carry them a bottle of Perrier.”
Left within the darkened closet, Starr testified she heard the whir of an electrical drill because the intruder boarded up the doorways with sheets of plywood. After the home fell silent, they rifled by way of pockets of garments contained in the closet, discovering a manicure package and a ninja star inside a field of childhood mementos. Utilizing these instruments and a nail file that Starr had slipped in her pocket when she used the restroom, they lower the zip ties and got here up with a plan.
As soon as the sunshine peeked by way of a niche within the closet doorways, Didden referred to as out for water. Listening to nothing, he kicked the plywood off the doorways and crawled out. The three climbed out a WC window, scaled a fence within the yard and banged on the window of a neighbor who referred to as 911.
Starr and Didden walked by way of their residence with officers from the Los Angeles Police Division. Starr testified her and her mom’s engagement rings had been lacking. So was a string of pearls she’d worn at her marriage ceremony and her great-grandfather’s pocket watch.
The doorjambs had been screwed shut and meals was scattered across the kitchen. In trash cans within the kitchen and toilet, detectives discovered ripped blue latex gloves, Deputy Dist. Atty. Catherine Chon mentioned in courtroom.
Police examined the gloves for DNA. After receiving the outcomes, they arrested Rodolfo Christopher Gil — the son of Starr and Didden’s next-door neighbor.
Starr testified that she and Gil’s household, whereas “not terribly shut,” had been “nice neighbors.” She’d recognized Gil for the 15 years she’d lived subsequent to his household.
“We share a driveway,” she mentioned.
In a movement for bail, Gil’s legal professional mentioned the 35-year-old father of 1 has no “prior violent legal historical past.” In line with a tax return hooked up to the movement, Gil reported being self-employed and earned about $40,000 in 2024, together with greater than $13,000 in unemployment advantages.
His lawyer, Paul Geller, requested Los Angeles County Superior Courtroom Decide Diego Edber to dismiss the costs in opposition to Gil, saying they weren’t supported by proof.
“It’s very attainable this was a reproduction gun,” he informed the decide.
Edber dominated he’d heard sufficient testimony for Gil to face trial on 16 counts of kidnapping, assault, false imprisonment, housebreaking, theft and legal threats.
A sheriff’s deputy led Gil again to a jail cell in handcuffs as he nodded to his household within the courtroom viewers.
It’s unclear in the event that they nonetheless reside subsequent door to Starr and Didden.
