A 47-year-old man was sentenced Friday to 50 years to life in prison for sexually assaulting two girls while living with their family in Costa Mesa.
Nelson Anibal Saavedra was convicted March 24 of molesting the girls from 2015 through 2022, according to court records.
The oldest girl told investigators she was assaulted starting when she was 6 until she was 12 years old when a classmate “nearly dragged” her to their principal’s office to report the alleged abuse, Deputy District Attorney Alyssa Marie Staudinger said in her opening statement of the trial.
The victim’s sister said she was first assaulted once in second grade when she 7 or 8, Staudinger said.
Staudinger on Friday argued for a 115 years-to-life sentence for the defendant.
One of the girls wrote a letter about how the crimes affected her that Staudinger read in court.
“The things Nelson did to me still affect me to this day,” she wrote. “It really heavily impacted my mental health. … I believe any guy I let into my life is going to do the things Nelson did to me.”
The girl’s mother wrote a statement saying, “For so long I blamed myself. … What the girls went through traumatized them.”
Both girls struggle with issues of self-harm and one has had to be hospitalized while the other suffers anxiety attacks. They both are in therapy, the mother said.
Orange County Superior Court Judge Lewis Clapp noted that Saavedra has only one misdemeanor in his past record and it dates back to 2000 and he successfully completed probation. The defendant’s children also wrote letters to Clapp supporting their father.
“He was actually a very good father, very supportive emotionally,” Clapp said. “His daughter said he went out of his way to spend time with his children.”
Clapp added, “It’s not that the accused is a bad person, but as a person you permitted yourself to do a bad thing. And in this case they were children.”
Saavedra will have to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life. He has 1,151 days credit for time served behind bars.
The victims’ mother was young and gave birth to one daughter when she was 17 and the other when she was 19, the prosecutor said during the trial. Their biological father was “not in the picture” and was living in Mexico, Staudinger said.
The victims’ mother began dating the defendant when she was 23 while he lived in the Los Angeles area and she lived in Costa Mesa with other relatives, Staudinger said.
One of the girls said she was in bed sleeping when the defendant first sexually assaulted her and told her not to tell anyone, Staudinger said.
“She doesn’t tell for years,” the prosecutor said. “She doesn’t tell her mom or her sister.”
Saavedra told the younger sister when she was in second grade to “turn around,” so she excitedly thought she was about to get a gift, Staudinger said. When it became apparent she was being assaulted, she said she had to go to the bathroom and the defendant let her go, Staudinger alleged.
The girl did not tell anyone right away, but a couple of days later confided in her sister, who was “very protective” of her younger sibling, Staudinger said.
The older girl “decided it was time to tell their mother,” Staudinger said.
Their mother, however, did not go to police, but, instead, “interrogated” her daughters and then drove to Los Angeles to confront the defendant, Staudinger said.
The girls’ mother, on the way home, told her daughters the defendant was “sorry,” and promised he wouldn’t “do it again,” the prosecutor said.
“The abuse stopped for a year,” Staudinger said.
Saavedra resumed molesting the older sister and then molested the other girl while they lived in Costa Mesa, Staudinger said.
“The typical pattern it falls into is when they went to sleep,” the prosecutor said.
As the older girl resisted him, he would “use more physical force on her” as she got older, Staudinger said.
When the older girl was in seventh grade, she told an eighth-grade boy in her drama class about the abuse in December 2021, Staudinger said.
Over the next four to five months, her classmate prodded her to tell someone, but she was discouraged and felt no one would believe her, Staudinger said.
At some point, the boy “nearly dragged her to the principal’s office,” to report the allegations, Staudinger said.
When police went to question Saavedra at his job at a fast food restaurant in Newport Beach, he told them the older girl was “sexually aggressive” and came on to him, but he pushed her away, Staudinger said. He also told investigators he hugged the sister once while aroused, Staudinger said.