Man charged with kidnapping, beating 3 youths

Robert Perea, The Fernley Reporter

Sheriff’s deputies rescued three youths and arrested the man who was accused of kidnapping and beating them Tuesday evening.

The suspect, Guillermo Aboytes Saavedra, 23, was arrested on a variety of charges, including kidnapping, child abuse and battery.

Lyon County Sheriff’s Office Chief Deputy Mitch Brantingham said deputies investigating a call that initially came in at 6:17 p.m. from someone who said her brother had texted her that someone was threatening to kill him and she was driving around trying to find her brother.

Deputies were dispatched at 6:18 p.m. to the 200 block of Johnson Lane for a report of threats and the first units arrived at 6:23 p.m.

Brantingham said at 6:39 p.m., the victim’s phone pinged near the location of the suspect’s home.

“Those pings kind of come into an area, so deputies immediately went to that area and started looking around for these kids,” Brantingham said.

Brantingham said that at 6:46 p.m. the reporting party was able to pull up an application on her phone and track her brother’s phone, which helped deputies narrow their search area. At 6:55 p.m., the caller’s brother called dispatch, reporting that he was in a basement with two other youths, and that the suspect had beaten them.

“As that call is happening, deputies are already entering the yard where these kids were located, so it was like a simultaneous occurring of events,” Brantingham said. “The phone call is going into dispatch at that time, but the deputies hadn’t received that information yet.”

Brantingham said deputies detained the suspect while other deputies searching the property found some siding and a barricade up against the side of the house leading to the crawl space and found the victims at 6:59 p.m.

“They were able to move that stuff out of the way and gain access, where they found the three juveniles,” he said.

Two of the youths had received substantial injuries from the suspect striking them repeatedly with wooden tools. They reported that the suspect had taken one of the youth’s phones and threatened to kill him. All three youths were transported to a hospital for treatment.

“They did sustain what I would consider substantial injuries,” Brantingham said.

Saavedra was arrested and booked into the Lyon County jail on charges of robbery with a deadly weapon, kidnapping, two counts of kidnapping with substantial bodily harm, false imprisonment, two counts of false imprisonment resulting in substantial bodily harm, three counts of child abuse and two counts of batter with a weapon resulting in substantial bodily injury.

After rescuing the kids and arresting Saavedra, Brantingham said deputies put together a timeline of events. The youths, who are elementary and middle school ages, were playing on the swings at the park located off Cory Way when Saavedra came out of nowhere with his fists balled up, asking one of them why he thinks he is so tough and telling them that he was a member of the Cartel.

The youth said Saavedra then slapped him in the face, telling them that he was not scared of jail and that if he went to jail, he was going to kill them. The youth said Saavedra then told them they were going to go for a walk and to act normal and not look at any cars. Saavedra then took them down an alleyway where he had them hop the fence into the back yard of 250 Johnson Lane.

“He used both coercion and low levels of force to make them leave the park with him,” Brantingham said.

The youth said Saavedra then took his phone and told him to unlock his phone and delete everything he had on there. He said Saavedra used his phone to record while he beat them, before forcing them into the crawl space under the house. The youths were continually removed from the crawl space and beaten.

Brantingham said investigators are looking for security camera footage and any witnesses who may have seen either what happened or the victims and suspect moving from one location to the other.

LCSO said Saavedra was previously known to law enforcement. Brantingham said there were no active warrants for him at the time of the case, but he was arrested in January on a charge of assault with a deadly weapon and in April on a charge of failure to appear after posting bail for a misdemeanor. The assault with a deadly weapon case was recently assigned to Third Judicial District Court in Yerington.