One after another, the agents from the California Department of Justice took the witness stand and related what the teenage girls and young women had told them: Naasón Joaquin Garcia, the leader of La Luz Del Mundo, an international church headquartered in Mexico, had raped them.
After five days of testimony, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Ronald S. Coen on Tuesday found that prosecutors from the California Attorney General’s office had gathered enough evidence to bind over for trial Garcia and two co-defendants, Alondra Ocampo and Susana Oaxaca, on all 36 counts of rape, child pornography, sex trafficking and extortion lodged against them.
All three have pleaded not guilty, arguing through their lawyers that the prosecution’s case rests on the untested, uncorroborated word of accusers whom the authorities have refused to identify.
Garcia, a dual citizen of the United States and Mexico, succeeded his father in 2014 as the leader of La Luz Del Mundo. The church’s followers, said to number in the millions, consider Garcia an “apostle” of Jesus Christ.
Read the full story on LATimes.com.
