SF man faces 21 charges of rape, with 3 victims
Incidents date back to 2013, when woman flagged down truck on I-25
SANTA FE — It apparently took police and prosecutors some time to figure out what Eddie Medrano was doing, but he is now scheduled for a plea hearing on nearly two dozen rape charges involving three women.
Medrano, 53, faces 21 counts of criminal sexual penetration — in addition to assault, false imprisonment and extortion charges — for crimes in 2013 and 2014 in three separate cases.
In the first case, which occurred two years before he was charged, a woman says she was drugged, held against her will and repeatedly raped after meeting Medrano in
Santa Fe, where court papers say he lived when he was arrested.
The woman said she was taken to a home that she believed was in Pecos and, after five days of being kept captive, she was able to f lee and was found along Interstate 25 by a passing motorist. Prosecutors say Medrano had a home in nearby Ilfeld.
A plea deal is on the table as Medrano is scheduled to appear Monday in Las Vegas District Court.
District Attorney Richard Flores said Medrano likely targeted homeless women with substance abuse problems, held them captive and raped them. “He had a plan to lure these ladies off the street,” Flores said in an interview.
“There definitely is evidence that he was holding them against their will. He would threaten them, and they were not able to leave at their own will.”
Medrano was arrested in Santa Fe on Sept. 15, 2014, on a warrant for rape, assault, false imprisonment and extortion, and was transported to the San Miguel County jail.
Police are releasing few details of that case or another he is charged in.
But details of the first case, which occurred in October 2013, appear in a bizarre police report that didn’t get much attention at the time, despite the woman’s horrific descrip- tion of what she said had happened to her. She said she had been drugged, woke up in the middle of sexual assaults and had been chased by someone with a chain saw over several days.
The State Police told the Journal at the time that the agency wasn’t pursuing this case for lack of evidence.
That case started when Rock Ulibarri of Las Vegas, since elected to the San Miguel County Commission, pulled over on the side of I-25 southwest of Las Vegas to assist a woman who was waving him down.
The woman jumped into his truck bed, yelling for him to call police and saying that someone was after her, according a police report obtained by the Journal.
Ulibarri said in a recent interview that the woman had been able to get away from a man later identified as Medra- no and an alleged accomplice.
“When I found her, they were apparently right behind her,” Ulibarri said.
Chief Deputy District Attorney Tom Clayton told the Journal on Thursday that Medrano did have an accomplice but that the second man is now deceased.
One officer wrote in a report from the 2013 incident that the woman whom Ulibarri helped appeared to be under the influence of alcohol or drugs and did not seem to have visible injuries.
The woman, 47 at the time, told police that five days before she was found on the interstate, she was at a parking lot somewhere in Santa Fe and said her “friend,” as well as Medrano, met her there. She said she ended up at Medrano’s house, which she believed was in Pecos, where they started drinking and smoking marijuana.
She said that she could remember being raped at least three times and that she would wake up with Medrano having sex with her.
The officer taking her statement wrote that the woman was hard to understand because she was distressed, talking rapidly and not making much sense. The woman said someone had chased her with a chain saw, but she could not provide a description of where she had been held. She believed the marijuana had been laced with another drug because it made her feel ill.
She was eventually treated by a Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE).
Medrano is charged in the case with eight first-degree rape charges and one count of false imprisonment for offenses that allegedly took place over that five-day period.
It’s unclear what led police to eventually go after Medrano for the 2013 case and subsequent assaults he is now charged for dating from 2014.
The Journal has made public records requests, but has been unable to obtain State Police reports related to the two other cases against Medrano. The DA’s office in Las Vegas filed charges against Medrano in the two other cases in 2014, soon after his arrest in September of that year:
A criminal information from the District Attorney’s Office, this one dated Oct. 2, 2014, alleges that Medrano raped a woman in San Miguel County on Aug. 6 of that year, and charges him with committing assault, false imprisonment and extortion on the same day.
On Dec. 3, 2014, he was charged with 12 counts of rape of a third victim. He’s accused of sexually assaulting the woman in San Miguel County “on or between” Aug. 30 and Sept. 15, 2014 — the day he was arrested in Santa Fe County.