Lara Starr had just passed through the door when she saw a masked man holding a firearm inside her house in the Woodland Hills.
Starr supposed that it was part of a game called Water Assassins that his son, a high school student, played with his classmates.
“It was not completely unusual for children to crawl in our house with big guns,” she said.
Starr testified during a preliminary audience on Wednesday in a courtroom in Van Nuys, where she described a series of bizarre and disturbing events that started in the afternoon of March 3.
She, her son and her husband were selected captive by a man who forced them in a closet and went on board the doors with plywood. Starr and his spouse said that the man said he intended to empty their retirement accounts. If they resisted, he promised to burn the house with them trapped inside.
The man finally accused of kidnapping, theft and threatening his family did not prove to be foreign to Starr. But when she saw the person standing in her corridor dressed in a white shirt with long sleeves, dark pants, a hood and blue latex gloves, she did not know who he was.
One of the friends of her son had taken the pistol game to squirt too far, she thought. Thinking that she would call her bluff, she turned to move away.
Something hard crashed at the back of his head. The intruder pushed her against a wall and threw her on the floor.
“There was blood everywhere,” she said.
The intruder held zipped links. “Behave,” he said.
Starr slipped the links around his wrists, and the intruder tightened them.
He dragged Starr to his feet and tied him to a chair inside a dressing room attached to the master bedroom. She asked what he wanted. Money, he said.
Starr told him where to find the keys to their safe, which held about $ 3,000 in cash belonging to his parents-in-law, which had been moved by the fire of the Palisades.
“Please,” she said, “take the money and go.”
After dragging Starr’s son in the closet and bind him to a link with another chair, the intruder proposed putting a compress on his head, which flees blood.
He spoke in “a kind of eastern European accent”, testified Starr, but sometimes decreased in “other unidentified accents”. As they were waiting for her husband to come back, the masked man was walking on himself.
It had been introduced by smuggling through the “port of Atlanta” within a shipping container, he said. Describing himself as a kind of servant under contract, he said that he had been “forced to work in a criminal business, and if he did not do it, he would be killed,” said Starr.
“He wanted to say that he knew a lot about us,” recalls Starr. The intruder said he had looked at the family’s alleys and alleys by hacking the surveillance system of a neighbor who offered a view of his aisle. He also knew, curiously, the names of the people who lived in the house before Starr.
Two hours have slipped. Then Starr heard the sound of her husband hitting the code at their door and the click-click of her bicycle shoes on the floor.
“You can hear him walk in the house, trying to understand what was going on,” she said.
The intruder pointed out a pistol at the door of the room, “while waiting for him to turn the corner,” said Starr.
Craig Didden testified that he had met a weapon pointed on his face.
“Relax,” said the masked person holding the weapon.
This voice seems familiar, remembers Didden.
The intruder ordered Didden to send emails to his employers and his wife and to the school of his son, explaining that they would have left for the next few days. Didden testified that he had done his best to type with his zipped wrists together while the man read his shoulder.
It would take five days to transfer all the money from their retirement accounts, the intruder told the family.
“He said he had a number of tools to get us to cooperate,” said Starr, “but the worst scenario case, he would leave us with a tie in the closet and burns the house.”
When the suspect brought them snacks – bananas, jerky water and sparkling water – Starr estimated that the test had turned into the absurd. “It seemed so incongruous to zip someone in their closet,” she said, “then bring them a bottle of Perrier.”
On the left in the obscured closet, Starr testified that she had heard the whirlwind of an electrical exercise while the intruder rose the doors with plywood leaves. After the house was silent, they folded through pockets of clothes inside the closet, finding a manicure kit and a ninja star inside a box of childhood memories. Using these tools and a nail file that Starr had slipped into her pocket when she used the toilet, they cut the zipped links and found a plan.
Once the light has taken a look at a gap in the doors of the closet, Didden called for water. By hearing nothing, he launched the plywood of the doors and crawled. The three came out of the bathroom window, set a fence in the courtyard and hit on the window of a neighbor who called 911.
Starr and Didden crossed their homes with police from the Los Angeles police service. Starr testified, she and her mother’s engagement rings were missing. The same goes for a series of pearls which she had brought to her wedding and the pocket watch of her great-grandfather.
The door doors had been closed and the food was dispersed in the kitchen. In the garbage cans in the kitchen and the bathroom, the detectives have found a torn blue latex gloves, a district. Atty. Catherine Chon said in court.
The police tested the gloves for DNA. After receiving the results, they stopped Rodolfo Christopher Gil – Starr’s son and the neighbor of Didden.
Starr testified that she and Gil’s family, although “not terribly close”, were “pleasant neighbors”. She had known Gil during the 15 years she lived next to her family.
“We share an alley,” she said.
In a deposit request, Gil’s lawyer said that the 35 -year -old father had no “violent criminal history”. According to a declaration of income attached to the request, Gil said they were self -employed and earn around $ 40,000 in 2024, including more than $ 13,000 in unemployment benefits.
His lawyer, Paul Geller, asked the judge of the High Court of the County of Los Angeles, Diego Edber, to reject the accusations against Gil, saying that they were not supported by evidence.
“It is very possible that it is a replica of the pistol,” he told the judge.
Edber judged that he had heard enough testimony for Gil to be tried on 16 heads of kidnapping, aggression, false imprisonment, burglary, theft and criminal threats.
An assistant to a sheriff brought Gil back to a handcuffed prison cell as he nodded to his family in the audience audience.
We do not know if they still live next to Starr and Didden.
