A sweeping manhunt in New York City ended on Tuesday after 23-year-old Angela Sauretti recognized a man in a black hoodie who entered the 108th Street Grocery in Queens at 1 a.m.
Sauretti was all but certain this was the face she had seen on Instagram—in an NYPD wanted poster for a man suspected in the machete-point rape of a 13-year-old girl as she walked with a boy her age last week.
Sauretti called out to a friend who stood nearby who had also seen the police Instagram posting. She asked if this was indeed the man more than 60 detectives had been seeking since Thursday’s broad daylight attack in a park across from the victim’s junior high school.
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“I pointed him out,” Sauretti told The Daily Beast. “I’m like, ‘Yo, that’s him?’ [The friend] said, ‘Yes, that’s him.’ That’s what confirmed it. And everything just spiraled from there.”
Sauretti grabbed the man in the hoodie.
“He tried to run, so I put him in a headlock,” she told The Daily Beast.
He continued to struggle and she took an opportunity to administer her own brand of street justice
“He got something that his mother should have done to him,” she said. “I’ll put it that way.”
She added, “As a woman, I had to really set the tone and remind him, ‘It wasn’t a man that did this to you. It was a woman.’”
He kept resisting, allowing her to further impart a particular lesson.
“You did that to a woman, and a woman got back and did this to you.” she said. “So it had him contemplating, ‘Maybe I won’t mess with the next woman.’ Because you never know. There’s nice ones and there's ones that will really defend themselves and go all out.”
The man protested.
“He said, ‘Let me explain!’ I’m like, ‘There’s nothing to explain. You’re a rapist,’” she recalled. “He said, ‘I don’t care.’ I’m like, ‘What do you mean you don’t 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 with it. Those who joined in included Daniel Ramos, who had overheard the figure in the black hoodie saying an hour earlier that he intended to board a plane for Ecuador in the morning.
The black hoodie and then a T-shirt underneath it came off as the man fought to get away. Sauretti said she saw a tattoo of what was either a boar or a bull with red eyes on his left upper chest, just as the NYPD described in its posting.
“That’s what made us go even harder,” Sauretti said.
The man managed to crawl under a car.
“Like a cat,” Sauretti said.
Sauretti and the others kept the car surrounded so he could not escape. She figures that the man was lucky that the police arrived on the scene when they did.
The officers arrested the man they later identified as 25-year-old Christian Geovanny Inga-Landi, an undocumented immigrant from Ecuador who had crossed the southern border at Eagle Pass, Texas in 2021. He was still bare-chested when he was perp walked from the 112 Precinct station house later in the morning, the tattoo there for all to see.
Sauretti spoke to detectives and was back outside the grocery in the afternoon.
“They said we made a citizen’s arrest,” she reported.
She told The Daily Beast that the $10,000 reward for information leading to the capture of the accused rapist had not been 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 as if that’s the right thing to do,” she said.
She reported that her mother is a school crossing guard and that she herself wants to go into radiology. She described a clear sense of self that guides 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. Nobody can peer pressure me. Nobody can tell me what to do.”
She said she had not come by this inner resolve naturally.
“I had to go through a lot,” she said.
The big manhunt had ended, and the one regret she voiced was that the glass on her wristwatch broke when she placed the accused rapist in a headlock.
“I’m upset, but it ‘s just a material thing,” the hero said.
