Meet the New York hero who caught a man accused of child rape

A large-scale manhunt in New York City ended Tuesday after 23-year-old Angela Sauretti recognized a man in a black hoodie entering the 108th Street Grocery in Queens at 1 a.m.

Sauretti was almost certain that this was the face she had seen on Instagram — on a New York Police Department wanted poster for a man suspected of raping a 13-year-old girl with a machete last week while she was out with a boy her age.

Sauretti called out to a friend who was standing nearby and had also seen the police Instagram post. She asked if this was indeed the man that more than 60 detectives had been searching for since the attack in broad daylight in a park across from the victim’s middle school.

“I showed him to myself,” Sauretti told The Daily Beast. “I was like, ‘Hey, that’s him?’ (The friend) said, ‘Yeah, that’s him.’ That confirmed it. And everything went downhill from there.”

Sauretti grabbed the man in the hoodie.

“He tried to run away, so I put him in a headlock,” she told The Daily Beast.

He continued to fight and she took the opportunity to apply her own brand of street justice.

“He got something his mother should have done to him,” she said. “That’s how I put it.”

She added: “As a woman, I really had to set the tone and remind him, ‘It wasn’t a man who did this to you. It was a woman.'”

He continued to resist and allowed her to further teach him a particular lesson.

“You did that to a woman, and the woman fought back and did that to you,” she said. “So he thought, ‘Maybe I won’t mess with the next woman.’ Because you never know. There are nice women and there are women who really defend themselves and give it their all.”

The man protested.

“He said, ‘Let me explain!’ I said, ‘There’s nothing to explain. You’re a rapist,'” she recalled. “He said, ‘I don’t care.’ I said, ‘Why don’t you care? You’re a rapist.’ He said, ‘I don’t care.'”

Another woman, 67-year-old Isabel Caizado, kicked the man before taking off one of her shoes to hit him. Among the accomplices was Daniel Ramos, who an hour earlier had heard the figure in the black hoodie say he wanted to board a plane to Ecuador the next morning.

The man first took off the black hoodie and then a T-shirt underneath as he tried to escape. Sauretti said she saw a tattoo on his left chest that depicted either a wild boar or a bull with red eyes, just as the NYPD described in its post.

“That made us push even harder,” Sauretti said.

The man managed to crawl under a car.

“Like a cat,” said Sauretti.

Sauretti and the others surrounded the car so that he could not escape. She believes the man was lucky that the police arrived on the scene in time.

Officers arrested the man, who they later identified as 25-year-old Christian Geovanny Inga-Landi, an undocumented immigrant from Ecuador who crossed the southern border at Eagle Pass, Texas, in 2021. He was still shirtless when he was led away from the 112th Precinct station later that morning, and the tattoo was visible to all.

Sauretti spoke to investigators and was back in front of the grocery store that afternoon.

“They said we had arrested a citizen,” she reported.

She told The Daily Beast that the $10,000 reward for information leading to the capture of the rape accused was not a factor in her decision to act.

“I would have done it even if it wasn’t a reward, because at the end of the day I feel like it’s the right thing to do,” she said.

She reported that her mother was a school crossing guard and that she herself wanted to go into radiology. She described a clear self-confidence that guided her.

“I have structure. I have boundaries. I know where I stand, what I like, what I don’t like, what I want to do, what I don’t want to do. No one can put peer pressure on me. No one can tell me what to do.”

She said that this inner determination did not come to her on its own.

“I had to go through a lot,” she said.

The huge manhunt was over, and her only regret was that the glass on her watch had broken when she had put the alleged rapist in a headlock.

“I am upset, but it is only a material thing,” said the hero.