gazette.com [local]
Address:http://www.gazette.com/archive/01-08-16/daily/loc1.htmlChanged:3:31
AM on Thursday, August 16, 2001
Bill Hethcock covers legal affairs and may be reached at 636-0232 or
[email protected]
Woman recounts break-in
72-year-old testifies she shot suspect in three rapes By Bill
Hethcock/The Gazette

Jean Zamarripa had just said her bedtime prayers when she heard a
strange noise toward the back of her house.

At first, the 72-year-old grandmother thought it was her humidifier, but
she quickly figured out it was someone trying to break into the back
door of her Knob Hill home.

Minutes later, she shot Anthony Allen Peralez and ended a string of
rapes targeting women in their 50s, 60s and 70s, prosecutors said
Wednesday on the first day of Peralez’s trial.

Zamarripa told jurors she grabbed her loaded revolver from under her bed
and braced her elbow on the counter to steady her trembling hand.

Barefoot and in her nightgown, she waited with the gun aimed where she
thought the intruder would enter.

Outside, she heard him prop open her storm door.

Then he ran up to and broke through the locked door, ripping the
deadbolt holder out of the doorjamb.

The intruder’s momentum knocked him to the ground, but Zamarripa never
adjusted her aim.

When he stood up, Zamarripa wounded him with three out of four shots
from about eight feet away before he scrambled out the door. “I knew if
I didn’t shoot him, he would have raped me,” she said.

Zamarripa said she knew of a 56-year-old woman and a 74-year-old woman
in her neighborhood who had been raped shortly before the Nov. 18
break-in at her home.

She seemed calm as she testified. But she told jurors she was full of
fear that night.

“In 72 years, I had never lived through anything like it,” she said.
“The only way I can describe it is sheer terror.”

Prosecutors have charged Peralez, 41, with burglarizing, raping and
beating a 56-year-old woman Sept. 2 on North Sheridan Avenue and a
74-year-old woman Aug. 6, 2000, on Eagle View Drive.

He also is charged with burglarizing, kidnapping and raping a
51-year-old Security woman Sept. 12, 1999.

In all three cases, the women lived alone, and in each case the women
were forced to bathe or were cleaned after being sexually assaulted.

Those similarities, along with the women’s ages and others, should
convince jurors that the man who committed the three rapes is the same
man who broke into Zamarripa’s house, prosecutor Christian Schwaner
said.

DNA evidence also connects the crimes, he said.

“This is literally every woman’s worst nightmare — to be home at night
and have somebody brutally rape you,” Schwaner said.

Public defender Eydie Elkins said Peralez made his only mistakes the
night he allegedly broke into Zamarripa’s house.

“His is the nightmare of false accusations,” she said.

Elkins said the defense will show the prosecution’s DNA evidence is not
reliable.

She said differences in the rapes suggest different suspects did them.

One woman was raped at gunpoint, one at knifepoint and in one case the
rapist used no weapon. One lasted more than six hours; another lasted
less than one hour, Elkins said.

“Each one was different, unique,” she said.
“When you listen to the evidence, it is clear that they were conducted
by different men, none of them Tony Peralez.”

The victim of the six-hour rape said her attacker had chest hair but not
a tattoo, Elkins said.
Peralez has “an unmistakable tattoo” on his torso, Elkins said.

Police who investigated the break-in and shooting at Zamarripa’s home
testified that a trail of blood led them from Zamarripa’s driveway north
to San Miguel Street, where Peralez got in his car and drove away.

Two blocks away, the wounded Peralez hit another car and kept going,
police testified.

From the site of the first crash on San Miguel, police followed a trail
of leaking oil, antifreeze and car parts past a second hit-and-run crash
he caused on Holmes Drive and eventually to the parking lot of a car
dealership near Galley and Academy Boulevard.

That’s where Peralez gave up, police testified. He had been shot once in
the abdomen and twice in the arm.

Blood samples taken from Zamarripa’s driveway and Peralez’s car and
clothes provided the genetic profile that linked him to the three rapes,
Schwaner said.

Zamarripa was cleared of any wrongdoing under a state law reaffirming
the right to defend one’s home.

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