Lawyers spar over whether girl was abducted or fled with man

(AP) — A prosecutor said on Thursday that a California man was eying his girlfriend's 15-year-old daughter before he helped bring the girl up from Mexico, raped her, abducted her from the family's home and forced her to live with him under a false name for a decade.

[...] a lawyer for now-42-year-old Isidro Garcia told jurors that his client was a hard-working janitor and machine operator who adored the girl he later made his wife and the mother of his child, and that she left her family's troubled Orange County home willingly with him as a teen.

Jurors heard two radically different accounts of the same sequence of events in opening statements of Garcia's trial on charges of rape, kidnapping and lewd acts on a child dating back to 2004.

The case drew widespread attention in 2014 after Garcia's wife went to authorities near their home in Bell Gardens, California, and said she was the subject of a missing persons report filed a decade earlier by her mother, soon after she had arrived in the country from Mexico.

Bokosky has also asked to call as a witness Elizabeth Smart, who was held captive for nine months after she was kidnapped from her Utah home and now works to bring awareness to predatory crimes against children.