Sheriff’s deputies in Palmdale found a 43-year-old paroled sex offender Wednesday hiding under under a mattress in a Palmdale home.
Joseph Serapiglia, who had cut off his court-ordered GPS monitoring device and hadn’t been seen since Friday in Panorama City, was arrested about 2:45 a.m. in the 36000 block of Auburn Court by deputies checking out a burglar alarm, sheriff’s Sgt. David Sauer said.
“The deputies responded to an audible alarm and when they arrived, they contacted a 40-year-old Adrian Madrigal at the location, who seemed to have trouble answering the deputies’ questions as to why he was there,” Sauer said. “The deputies then detained Mr. Madrigal and continued to search the location.”
Sauer said Serapiglia “gave the deputies several phony names at first, but finally they discovered that he was the parolee which law enforcement had been searching for.”
Serapiglia was booked on the outstanding felony warrant, and Madrigal on suspicion of being under the influence of a controlled substance, the sergeant said.
Sauer said the investigation was continuing and he did not yet know what, if any, relationship existed between the two men or if Madrigal helped hide Serapiglia.
Serapiglia was convicted of attempted murder and rape and sentenced to 42 years in prison in 1991. He raped a neighbor and stabbed her six times after he lured her to Topanga Canyon, where he threw her down a 25-foot cliff, leaving her for dead.
At the time, he was working as a part-time stock clerk and lived, as did the victim, in a Canoga Park apartment complex owned by his father. Serapiglia told the woman that his father was missing in Topanga and he didn’t know the area to get her into his van. She told authorities that he beat her and raped her in the van after driving her to the top of the canyon and pushing her over the cliff.
Another woman found the victim and helped get her to a hospital, where she was treated for a punctured lung and fractured skull, among other injuries.
On April 16, 2014, Serapiglia was paroled to live in the city of San Fernando.
— City News Service