A 64-year-old convicted sex offender was sentenced Friday to 8 1/2 years in prison for assaulting two underage teen girls in Garden Grove.
Robert Rudy Salinas accepted a plea deal from Orange County Superior Court Judge Craig Robison on Feb. 4.
Salinas assaulted the girls in January 2025.
Prosecutors said in court papers that Garden Grove Police Department officers responded to a report of rape just before 6:40 p.m. on Jan. 21, 2025. The victim, who was 15, “told someone at school that she recently met up with a 47-year-old male and had sexual intercourse with him,” prosecutors said.
The girl’s mother told officers that she had claimed to have made up the allegation, prosecutors said. Then the girl denied it to officers, who returned to the girl’s home when her mother “found concerning things on a laptop computer that” the girl used, prosecutors said.
The laptop had messages through an app about sex acts with an underage girl, prosecutors said.
The girl’s mother later saw her daughter with the defendant at a nearby park on Feb. 2, 2025, and called police, prosecutors said.
The girl acknowledged to police she had sex with Salinas, prosecutors said.
In court papers to lower his bail, the defendant’s attorney, Matthew Blake Wallin, said Salinas “has lived in Orange County his entire life” and was born in Santa Ana. At the time he was charged he resided in Buena Park, where he lived with his wife of 34 years and an adult son.
Salinas pleaded guilty to two counts of lewd acts on a child 14 or 15 years old, two counts of contacting a minor with the intent to commit a sex offense, and single counts each of meeting a minor to commit lewd conduct, a sex offense with a prior arranged meeting and sexual penetration by a foreign object of a victim younger than 16, all felonies.
Salinas was convicted in June 2007 of lewd or lascivious acts on a minor, according to the criminal complaint. He appeared on television personality Chris Hansen’s “To Catch a Predator” show in 2007.
He was arrested in 2007 by Long Beach police after “arriving at a sting residence in an attempt to meet with a 13-year-old girl who was home alone while her aunt was gone,” prosecutors said in court papers.