Police: Prints In Victim's Car Lead To Accused Brickell Rapist
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MIAMI (CBSMiami) -- Police have arrested a man, accusing him of a rape in Brickell over the weekend.
Officers arrested 41-year-old Tony Martehidalgo on Tuesday on charges including sexual battery and false imprisonment.
On Wednesday, a judge ruled he will not be let out on bond.
According to the police report, the woman was sleeping in her car with the doors unlocked on Saturday when a man woke her up, choking her from the passenger side.
The man then pulled her by the neck to the rear seat and forced her to have sex, continuing to choke her and holding her left arm down when she tried to struggle.
At some point, she tried escaping through the trunk of the vehicle and ran for help while nude on South Miami Avenue near 14th Street around 2:30 a.m.
"I just see a girl running naked, completely naked, and she was running just to my car, and asked me to get in," said Eduardo, a Good Samaritan who helped, and asked that we use only his first name.
He said he took the distraught woman to get help from a police officer, working an off-duty job at a club a couple of blocks away.
Eduardo was shirtless, having given the woman his shirt to cover herself.
"She was crying, she said, 'he raped me, somebody raped me," Eduardo recounted.
Police said they were able to track down Martehidalgo through fingerprints left inside the car.
Cops also say Martehidalgo, a homeless man, was described by a witness who saw him running from the victim's car.
Martehidalgo frequents the area where the incident happened, according to officers.
When police arrested him, he reportedly refused to provide DNA samples and denied attacking the woman.
The woman told police she had never personally known the man accused of raping her and denied ever having consensual sex with him.
While talking to police, she picked him from a photo lineup while crying and saying, "That's the man who raped me. I remember the beard."
Three of the charges against Martehidalgo carry up to life in prison if he is convicted.
