A jury will now decide the fate of a man accused of sexual assault and burglary in a string of home invasions and hiking trail attacks in Ventura County from 2016 to 2020.
The prosecuting and defense attorneys gave closing arguments Friday in the trial of Edgar Rodriguez Ruelas, and jurors began their deliberations Friday afternoon. The Woodland Hills man was arrested in 2020 and charged with felonies in five incidents, including sexual assault, assault with the intent to commit a forcible sex crime, and burglary with the intent to commit sexual assault.
According to prosecutors, he sexually assaulted one woman by penetrating her with fingers and attempted to sexually assault the other four victims. Those women either escaped or fought off their attacker.
Rodriguez Ruelas did not deny that he entered the homes of the alleged victims in his trial or grabbed them on hiking trails. But his attorney, Sandra Bisignani, in her closing argument on Friday, argued that he did not intend to rape or sexually assault them, which is required to convict him of the most serious crimes he was charged with.
Instead, Bisignani told the jury that her client has a fetish for women’s underwear, which drove him to break into homes in his Ventura neighborhood in 2016 and in Thousand Oaks in 2017. He assaulted one woman because he wanted to touch her underwear, and that was his goal in the attempted assaults as well, Bisignani said.
The case, she said, is “not a whodunit” but a “why-done-it.”
“Mr. Rodriguez is not a rapist,” Bisignani said. “He did not intend to rape anyone and he did not intend to forcibly sexually penetrate anyone. … He had an underwear fetish that he kept secret his entire life and that fetish turned into obsession.”
In his closing argument to the jury, Deputy District Attorney Brent Nibecker, the prosecutor in the case, said the available evidence all points to Rodriguez Ruelas breaking into homes or following women on trails in order to sexually assault them.
Investigators never found evidence he stole anyone’s underwear, Nibecker said, and in his job as a residential window installer, there were never any complaints by clients that he went through their underwear drawers or took anything from their homes.
“If he’s just after their underwear, why does he attack solo women on hiking trails?” Nibecker said. “Why wouldn’t he go into empty apartments and go through people’s underwear drawers?”
Police and prosecutors believe Rodriguez Ruelas was responsible for more than the five assaults and attempted assaults he was charged with. There was a string of nighttime break-ins and peeping incidents in 2016 in the Ventura neighborhood where Rodriguez Ruelas lived at the time, near the Ventura County Government Center, and the crimes stopped when he moved out of the area. He was charged with two of those break-ins, and a similar one in Thousand Oaks in 2017.
In March 2020, Rodriguez Ruelas was arrested in San Diego, the day after a 16-year-old girl reported that a man attacked her on a hiking trail in Oak Park. Police then connected him to the break-ins in Thousand Oaks and Ventura. He is now 41, and has been in Ventura County jail since his arrest.
Prosecutors also presented evidence during the trial that he touched another woman without her consent years earlier, and that in 2013 he was caught going though the underwear of 12-year-old twin girls who were guests in a hotel where he worked.
Those accusations were not part of the criminal charges against him, but jurors are allowed to consider them as evidence of his motive or intent in the incidents he was charged for, if they decide it was more likely than not that he committed those uncharged offenses.
Investigators also found pornography in Rodriguez Ruelas’ internet history that was, Nibecker said, “eerily specific and eerily similar” to crimes he was charged with. He searched adult websites for terms including “young teen forced” and for videos with sleeping women, home invasion scenarios and encounters on hiking trails, Nibecker said. There were not any search terms related to women’s underwear.
“We’re not here to criminalize pornography, but what we see here provides insight into the type of things that sexually arouse the defendant,” Nibecker said. “What he searched for in private reveals volumes about what goes on in his head.”
In her closing argument, Bisignani said those searches represented a small, cherry-picked slice of Rodriguez Ruelas’ internet history and do not indicate any desire to assault women.
“Who cares if Mr. Rodriguez watched pornography?” she said. “There is zero evidence to show that watching pornography leads to the commission of sexual offenses. … The prosecution is trying to scare you, but you can’t let fear make your decision for you.”
Tony Biasotti is an investigative and watchdog reporter for the Ventura County Star. Reach him at [email protected]. This story was made possible by a grant from the Ventura County Community Foundation’s Fund to Support Local Journalism.
This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Jury takes case of man accused in Ventura, T.O. sexual assaults
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