KENNER, La. — Kenner police have arrested 23-year-old Diego Rodriguez-Salvador.
He’s accused of kidnapping a 13-year-old girl from the Veterans Heights Subdivision on Tuesday night and raping her.
Police say Rodriguez was a friend of the family who offered to drive the girl to a store.
“On the way to the store she noticed he was going in a different direction, he pulled a knife and took her to a trailer that he lived in on Malinda Court and he sexually assaulted her,” Kenner Police Chief Keith Conley said.
Conley confirms Rodriguez is undocumented and in the country illegally.
“The same undocumented illegals that are coming from Eagle Pass that have been a thorn in Texas’s side, they’re just moving further in,” Conley said. “I think we’re all seeing that now. It’s everything from small violations to big violations. It’s just a drain on resources.”
Hispanic community advocate Tatiana Begault says focusing on the suspect’s legal status is not relevant to the crime he’s accused of committing.
She claims such rhetoric stokes fear in the community.
“If we fall under that rhetoric then every American is this, every immigrant is that, or every individual, we’re all humans,” Begault said. “There’s good and bad in every nationality.”
More than one in four Kenner residents identify as Hispanic.
Chief Conley says his department does not focus on ethnicity; it focuses on crime.
“If you’re here undocumented or illegal and you don’t do anything wrong, we wouldn’t know. We would have no reason to be concerned with what you do. The issue is every time we turn around, we are having issues.”
Rodriguez was booked on charges of second-degree kidnapping and second-degree rape of the juvenile.
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