The young woman who spotted a wanted child rape suspect has revealed she grabbed him by the neck and wrestled him to the ground before police arrived to arrest him.
Sixty New York detectives were looking for illegal migrant Christian Geovanny Inga-Landi after he was named as the prime suspect in the machete-point rape of a 13-year-old girl outside her junior high school on Thursday.
But he was only arrested on Tuesday after Angela Sauretti, 23, recognized him from a police wanted poster she had seen on Instagram and pointed him out to a friend.
‘He tried to run, so I put him in a headlock,’ she told The Daily Beast. ‘He got something that his mother should have done to him,’ she added. ‘I’ll put it that way.’
But when she called him a rapist Sauretti said he showed no remorse and attempted to defend his actions.
‘He said ”let me explain!”,’ she revealed. ‘I’m like, ”there’s nothing to explain, you’re a rapist, you raped a little girl”, he said, ”I don’t care”.’
The teenage girl had had been playing soccer with a 13-year-old schoolfriend in a Queen’s park when Inga approached them at around 3.30pm, police said.
He threatened them with a ‘large machete-style knife’ before forcing both into a secluded area and tying their wrists together with a shoelace.
He then raped the girl, stole their cellphones and ran off.
The attack horrified the city but the trail went cold until the early hours of Tuesday morning when Sauretti spotted the hooded figure entering a grocery store less than a mile to the west.
‘I pointed him out,’ Sauretti said. ‘I’m like, ‘Yo, that’s him?’ He said, ‘Yes, that’s him’. ‘That’s what confirmed it. And everything just spiraled from there.’
Footage of his capture went viral on Tuesday showing Inga-Landi cowering under car and surrounded by furious residents before being tied to a post as police raced to the scene.
A woman, thought to be Sauretti was recorded roaring ‘I beat the s*** out of him’, before explaining on Tuesday how she was determined to impress on the suspected rapist that his downfall had come at the hands of a woman.
‘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 aspiring radiologist explained.
‘You did that to a woman, and a woman got back and did this to you.
‘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.
‘So that’s why we put our hands and feet on him. I don’t regret it at all.’
By this time more had joined the attempt to restrain him, including Isabel Caizado, 67, who kicked him before taking off one of her shoes to hit him with it.
The man’s hoodie and T-shirt came off as he struggled to get away revealing a chest tattoo that Sauretti recognized from the NYPD appeal.
‘That’s what made us go even harder,’ Sauretti said.
Inga-Landi crossed the southern border at Eagle Pass, Texas, in 2021, and Daniel Ramos, who assisted in his capture, said he overheard him an hour earlier revealing he planned to board a plane for his native Ecuador later that morning.
Police arrested him and took him from the 112 Precinct station house on Tuesday morning to court where he faces multiple charges of rape, kidnap and sex abuse.
Sauretti, the daughter of a school crossing guard may be in line for the $10,000 reward put up for Inga-Landi’s capture, but says it was not on her mind as she restrained the heavily built suspect.
‘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.
‘I have structure. I have boundaries. I know where I stand, what I like, what I don’t like, what I want to do, what I don’t want to do.
‘Nobody can peer pressure me. Nobody can tell me what to do.’