A 53-year-old man was sentenced Wednesday to more than 25 years in federal prison for kidnapping a woman with dementia from the West Los Angeles Veterans Affairs Medical Center, then obstructing an FBI investigation into the abduction.
Johnny Ray Gasca was sentenced to 310 months -- or 25 years and 10 months -- by U.S. District Judge André Birotte Jr., who had previously found the New York City man guilty of one count of kidnapping, two counts of attempted obstruction of justice and one count of attempted witness tampering, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.
Gasca kidnapped the 68-year-old woman at about 8:30 a.m. on July 19, 2021, after she attempted to obtain a medical appointment at the VA facility.
Gasca described the woman -- identified in court papers by the initials E.C. -- as his girlfriend in order to steal tens of thousands of dollars from her, prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memorandum.
"After the victim managed to get away from (Gasca), he abducted her from the grounds of a hospital where she had sought care for her dementia, in order to steal even more of her money," the memorandum said. "Immediately after the abduction, he attempted to indoctrinate her to parrot back a version of events favorable to him."
After the Department of Veterans Affairs Police Department contacted the FBI later in the morning, a friend of the victim told agents she recognized Gasca, believed he previously was in some kind of relationship with the victim, and suspected Gasca may have taken some of the victim's money from her bank and retirement accounts.
The witness also reported that the victim previously noted she was missing some of her credit cards, and that when the two went to the victim's bank to review her accounts, bank records showed a $35,000 withdrawal from the victim's retirement account, followed by several Venmo, MoneyGram and PayPal transactions that the friend believed the victim did not have "the knowledge or wherewithal" to conduct, according to evidence presented at the June bench trial in Los Angeles federal court.
Within hours of beginning its investigation, the FBI located the victim's phone at a hotel on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles, where agents converged. Soon after, Gasca and the victim exited the hotel, leading to Gasca's arrest.
During an interview recounted in court documents, Gasca described the victim as his girlfriend and told agents that, after leaving the VA facility, they stopped at a bank, where the victim made a $15,000 withdrawal.
After his arrest and while in pre-trial custody, Gasca made several jail calls to a friend in New York asking him to destroy evidence of his crime, according to evidence. Gasca urged the friend to erase all his messages on the Facebook Messenger app, including messages describing the victim as a "golden goose," evidence showed.
In August 2021, Gasca made another jailhouse phone call to his friend and told him to collect his hard drives from his apartment before the FBI could seize them and learn of his financial exploitation of the victim, according to evidence.
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