Man sentenced to prison for series of rapes in Fresno County

FRESNO COUNTY, Calif. (KFSN) -- A man accused of a series of Fresno County rapes dating back to 2017 received his prison sentence Thursday.

Guadalupe Gonzalez must serve ten years for the crimes after two of the charges were dropped, and he reached a plea deal with prosecutors on the remaining counts.

He must also pay $3,000 in restitution and is not allowed to contact the victim.

"The defendant has engaged in violent conduct that indicates a serious danger to society," Judge Samuel Dalesandro said. "You must not harass, strike, threaten, assault, hit, follow, stalk, molest, or destroy her personal property," he added.

The case came to a head in October 2021 when prosecutors said Gonzalez consensually met a woman at a San Joaquin apartment. But what started as a date quickly took a turn.

Prosecutors say Gonzalez took the woman's phone, held her a gunpoint, and raped her inside the apartment.

The violent attack did not end there. Gonzalez ordered the victim into his Chevy Tahoe and raped her again in a rural part of Fresno County.

He threw her phone in an orchard and drove away. The victim went to the hospital, and sheriff's detectives arrested Gonzalez days later.

That is when they tied him to two other rapes that happened in 2017 and 2019.

"He would meet them consensually. He would have conversations with them, and then the real person that they were meeting with would start to surface. That predator would come out. That rapist would come out," Lt. Brandon Pursell with the Fresno County Sheriff's Office said in October 2021.

While authorities tied him to three rapes after his arrest in 2021, they said he could also be responsible for other sexual assaults that victims never reported.

Prosecutors later dropped two of the three rape charges that were initially filed.

"The resolution reached in this matter was done so only after carefully assessing the case's strengths and weakness and the potential for evidentiary challenges and success at trial," said Taylor Long with the Fresno County District Attorney's Office.

"Given these considerations, we do believe the stipulated 10-year prison sentence is an appropriate outcome."

Gonzalez also served jail time for rape in 2004.

In 2014, police charged him for an assault with a deadly weapon.

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