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Warrant: Man used Google Translate to communicate with teen victim after alleged rape

A Zebulon man charged with sexually assaulting a 15-year-old girl last week used a cellphone app to communicate with her after the alleged attack, according to a search warrant.

Posted Updated

By
Amanda Lamb
, WRAL reporter, & Matthew Burns, WRAL.com senior producer/politics editor
ZEBULON, N.C. — A Zebulon man charged with sexually assaulting a 15-year-old girl last week used a cellphone app to communicate with her after the alleged attack, according to a search warrant.

Victor Emandes Ramirez, 33, of 9323 Sprites Drive, is charged with first-degree kidnapping, statutory rape of a child age 15 or younger and statutory sex offense of a child age 15 or under. He remains in the Wake County jail under $1 million bond.

The girl said she was grabbed by a man while walking to her school bus stop last Thursday morning, and he forced her into his car and drove her to his mobile home, where he then took her into a backyard shed, according to an application for a warrant to search the home and the shed. After he sexually assaulted her and forced her to perform sex acts, he drove her to school, the application states.

While driving her to school, the girl said, the man used Google Translate on his cellphone to translate his Spanish to English to tell her she was pretty and ask that she not tell anyone what happened, according to the warrant application.

Wake County Sheriff's Office investigators used images from the school's security cameras to identify the vehicle that dropped the girl at school and then traced the vehicle back to Ramirez, who was arrested later that day.

"It could have gone a lot of different ways, but luckily, the sheriff got him before I did," the girl's father said Tuesday. "I hope he gets life in prison, and I hope he gets tortured every day of his life."

The girl's school called him and 911 after she was dropped off, he said, and he rushed to the school to be with her.

"It was one of the worst phone calls you could ever get and one of the hardest things to deal with," he said.

"We're going to get through it," he added. "It's just tough, it really is, but my main goal is to try to make her better."

Ramirez admitted to investigators that he had sex with the girl, according to applications for warrants to obtain his DNA and search his cellphone. Investigators said the call logs and GPS information on the phone could verify the timeline of events and that the Google Translate logs might still be on the device.

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