CASPER, Wyo. — A registered sex offender will serve at least 125 years in state prison after being sentenced Tuesday for the kidnapping and sexual assault of an 8-year-old Rock Springs girl earlier this year, according to Sweetwater County officials.
Luis Saavedra Villa, 44, pleaded no contest to the charges, according to a joint release by Sweetwater County Attorney Dan Erramouspe and Sheriff John Grossnickle.
Villa was living in Rock Springs and working for a local oil field at the time of the offense. According to the release, he is a foreign national from Mexico who had been living in the country illegally after being deported for a sexual assault conviction in Uinta County in 2001.
In June, SCSO deputies and detectives responded to a residence north of Rock Springs after the victim reported to her brother that she had been sexually assaulted the night before.
“Investigators soon learned that Saavedra Villa, a family friend known to the child as ‘uncle,’ had picked up the young girl at her residence during the evening, while the child’s mother was at work, took the child to McDonald’s, and then sexually assaulted her in his work truck before dropping her back off at her home,” the release said.
“The young girl tried to escape during the sexual assault, but Saavedra Villa locked the truck’s doors and would not let her get out of the vehicle. Saavedra Villa also forced the girl to clean up her own blood from his truck after the assault,” the release said.
After a medical and forensic examination at Memorial Hospital of Sweetwater County, the child was immediately transported for emergency surgery at Primary Children’s Hospital in Salt Lake City, Utah, for injuries she sustained during the sexual assault.
Both Erramouspe and Grossnickle credited the outcome of this case to the unparalleled bravery of the young child victim during the investigation, the due diligence of investigators, and a collaborative effort by both agencies.
This “allowed for a successful prosecution to the fullest extent of the law of this heinous and brutal attack by a predator who will never again have the opportunity to victimize another innocent child, all without ever risking re-victimizing her by needing her to testify at trial,” the release added.
