A man in the United States illegally has been charged with transporting a 15-year-old Woodbridge girl from Virginia to Maryland where he held her against her will for several months and had sex with her, federal authorities said.
Rosendo Manfredis Carranza, 28, was indicted Thursday and faces up to life in prison. After his 2006 arrest in Maryland, he was extradited to Texas, where he was wanted on charges of sexually assaulting a child in a separate incident. He was recently returned to Virginia to face the latest charges, prosecutors said.
According to a sworn statement by an FBI agent, by the time the 15-year-old girl was reunited with her family, she was hardly recognizable to her mother.
Carranza met the girl while he was renting a room from her parents in Woodbridge. He started having sex with her when she was 14, the statement said.
On Jan. 12, 2006, the girl’s parents reported to county police that their then-15-year-old daughter was missing, and Carranza’s belongings were gone, the statement said.
Carranza, investigators later learned, took the girl to Prince George’s County, where they lived with the family of a woman he knew from El Salvador. He paid $400 a month for the room and bed he shared with his 15-year-old “girlfriend.”
The woman whom Carranza knew, referred to as “AH” in the statement, took the girl to a salon and had her waist-length dark hair cut, died red and curled. AH later took the girl to a business in the District, where the girl received a fake name and Social Security number.
AH, the statement said, then got the girl a job at a McDonald’s in Maryland, where AH already was employed.
Throughout this time, the girl told Carranza she wanted to go home, but he warned he would go to jail if she did, the statement said. Around Easter 2006, he let the girl call home from a pay phone. She told her sister that she wanted to come home and that Carranza wouldn’t let her.
The girl was rescued in September 2006 by U.S. Marshals, who surveyed the Clinton home for more than a week after receiving a tip.
Carranza’s attorney, Kevin Brehm, did not return calls for comment.
