A Gilroy man accused of raping three women listened with little
reaction Friday morning as the third woman to testify in the case
offered an often-tearful recount of the hours leading up to his
arrest last summer.
A Gilroy man accused of raping three women listened with little reaction Friday morning as the third woman to testify in the case offered an often-tearful recount of the hours leading up to his arrest last summer.
Wearing a dark suit, Gerardo Ceballos, 25, sat a few yards away from the witness stand next to his defense attorney as several of his family members looked on. Gilroy police arrested Ceballos twice last summer – once on suspicion of assaulting and molesting a female victim in the back of his car and a second time after another woman reported him to the Gilroy Police Department for beating and raping her.
The district attorney charged Ceballos with three counts of rape, one count of oral copulation by force and one count of inflicting bodily injury – all felonies. If convicted on all charges, he faces a minimum of life in prison.
For about an hour, Deputy District Attorney Stuart Scott walked one of the victims through the events prior to Ceballos’ arrest on July 19, 2008. Over the course of the victim’s several year relationship with the defendant, Ceballos tried to control her and alienate her from her friends and family, the woman said. The relationship turned violent one evening when Ceballos hit her for looking at one of his friends the wrong way. He also forced her to have sex with him more than 20 times during their relationship while holding her arms behind her back as she lay prostrate.
“He said I was going to be with him no matter what, so I could make it hard or easy,” she said. When Scott asked her why she didn’t leave, she responded, “I was scared of what he would do to me.”
On July 18, the woman, who is not from Gilroy and hadn’t seen Ceballos in about a week, met Ceballos at his apartment near Leavesley Road and Church Street. After having a drink and consensual sex, the two drove to a bar in Monterey and continued drinking. The woman said she wanted to leave a couple hours later because she wasn’t having fun, and Ceballos was flirting with and talking to other girls. He eventually disappeared and ignored her text messages.
After waiting in her car for 45 minutes, she decided to drive home without Ceballos, she said. When stopped at a red light, Ceballos caught up to the car and jumped in, yelling at her and hitting her in the face, she said.
He instructed her to pull over and switch seats with him so he could drive.
“Why didn’t you run?” Scott asked.
“Where would I have gone?” she implored.
On the drive back to Gilroy, she curled up in the passenger seat to fend off his blows. He threatened to leave her in the mountains, “like last time,” she said, referring to a previous incident when Ceballos drove her up to Mount Madonna and broke her phone after he saw a number in it he didn’t recognize.
“He said he would break all the bones in my body like he broke my phone,” she said.
In the car, he tried forcing her to perform oral sex, pulling out his penis and pushing her head into his lap, she said dabbing her eyes.
“He was just pounding on me,” she said, making several downward hand gestures with a closed fist.
Scott displayed a photo police took of the victim the morning after, her straight hair matted and tangled, and her right eye almost completely swollen shut. In the photo, she wore one of Ceballos’ T-shirts and a pair of shorts. The photo was barely recognizable as the polished looking woman who took the witness stand wearing a black button up dress shirt and gray slacks.
Back at Ceballos’ apartment, the woman took off running down the driveway, but the defendant caught up with her and walked her back into the apartment and into his bedroom, she said.
“I just knew it wasn’t going to be good,” she said. “I knew he was going to force me to do something I didn’t want to do.”
She asked to go to the bathroom, but Ceballos was waiting for her outside the door when she emerged, she said. He pushed her down onto her knees again trying to force her to perform oral sex before putting her on her stomach and having unprotected sex with her from behind. Afterwards, he lay down next to her and put his arm around her.
“I couldn’t stand being there next to him,” she said.
She asked to take a shower and he joined her, touching her face and apologizing for what he had done, she said.
“I heard it before,” she said, her face reddening as she broke into quiet sobs.
The two fell asleep together in the same bed, but when the woman woke up in the morning, she drove to the Gilroy Police Department and reported Ceballos.
Police arrested Ceballos later that day. He is currently in custody without bail and will be back Monday in the South County Courthouse in Morgan Hill, Department 110.
Ceballos’ mother declined to comment outside the court room.
