Heroic New Yorker recounts how she placed migrant wanted in girl’s rape at Queens park into headlock: ‘As a woman, I had to really set the tone’
One of the good Samaritans who nabbed the 25-year-old Ecuadorean migrant wanted for the brutal sexual assault of a 13-year-old girl at a Queens park recalled how she bravely placed him in a headlock during the citizen’s arrest to send the message to not “mess with the next woman.”
Angela Sauretti, 23, immediately recognized the man police named as the prime suspect in the broad-daylight attack inside Kissena Park in which a boy and girl, both 13, were held at knifepoint with a “machete-style” blade and had their hands tied with shoelaces before the girl was raped.
Sauretti turned to her friend and asked if the man in front of them at the 108th Street Grocery in Queens around 1 a.m. Tuesday, was the same man they had just seen on an NYPD wanted poster.
“I pointed him out,” Sauretti told The Daily Beast. “I’m like, ‘Yo, that’s him?’ [The friend] said, ‘Yes, that’s him.’ That’s what confirmed it. And everything just spiraled from there.”
Sauretti then grabbed the man, and as he tried to run away, she put him in a headlock, she told the outlet.
“He got something that his mother should have done to him,” she said. “I’ll put it that way.”
She added, “As a woman, I had to really set the tone and remind him, ‘It wasn’t a man that did this to you. It was a woman.’”
The man, later identified by police as Christian Geovanny Inga-Landi, continued to resist, prompting Sauretti to lay into him.
“You did that to a woman, and a woman got back and did this to you.” she recalled saying. “So it had him contemplating, ‘Maybe I won’t mess with the next woman.’ Because you never know. There’s nice ones and there’s ones that will really defend themselves and go all out.”
She said Inga-Landi protested the citizen’s arrest and wanted to try and explain himself to her.
“He said, ‘Let me explain!’ I’m like, ‘There’s nothing to explain. You’re a rapist,’” she added. “He said, ‘I don’t care.’ I’m like, ‘What do you mean you don’t care? You’re a rapist.’ He said, ‘I don’t care.’”
A group of good Samaritans joined the chaotic citizen’s arrest, captured in dramatic video and photos obtained by The Post, showing Inga-Landi cowering on the sidewalk as an angry mob pounds him and calls him a “rapist.”
Among the group was 67-year-old Isabel Caizado, who kicked the man before taking off one of her shoes to beat him with and Daniel Ramos, who overheated Inga-Landi say he was going to fly to Ecuador in the morning.
As Inga-Landi wrestled with the group, his hoodie and T-shirt came off, revealing a tattoo of either a boar or a bull with red eyes on his upper chest — just as the NYPD described in its wanted poster.
“That’s what made us go even harder,” Sauretti said.
The man managed to crawl under a car, but the others kept it surrounded until cops arrived.
Sauretti spoke with police after the citizen’s arrest and later told the Daily Beast the $10,000 reward for information leading to the suspect’s capture was not what made her decide to spring into action.
“I would have done it even if it wasn’t a reward because at the end of the day, I feel as if that’s the right thing to do,” she said.
Inga-Landi faces a slew of charges, including rape, kidnapping and sex abuse, after cops arrested him thanks to a flood of help from Sauretti and all the others who lassoed him on the street, NYPD brass said later Tuesday.
