This is Little Caesar’s Pizza. How can I help you?
On July 8, 2003, a Little Caesar’s cashier in San Jose, California, received the most unusual call. A little girl with a whimpering voice, holding back her tears, spelled every letter of her address one by one. Little did they know, she had been kidnapped, and her abductor was forcing her to make that call.
After multiple days of captivity, this had been her only contact with the outside world.
He went downstairs, came back upstairs with the pizza, and was standing with the pizza box, staring at me. He handed me a flyer. On the flyer was a picture of a girl, and it said “Missing.”
I turned to myself and thought, “I have to get rid of it tonight.”
Kidnapped, assaulted, and held in bounds, nine-year-old Jeannette Tamayo was long gone when the police finally arrived at the scene. A young girl had been abducted from her home after school. The police later got their hands on some footage from a nearby security camera, but it was quickly deemed useless due to the low quality of the recording.
Police had no leads in the disappearance of nine-year-old Jeannette Tamayo.
After days without any development in her case, and no statewide Amber Alert issued, Jeannette knew she had to take matters into her own hands. “My fear turned into courage,” she later said, “and I told myself, I’m a fighter. I’m gonna make it.”
In the thriving city of San Jose, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, nine-year-old Jeannette Tamayo just got off her school bus and was heading home. It was an ordinary afternoon, the kind she had experienced countless times before. Once there, she noticed that the screen door was slightly ajar.
She thought that maybe her mother had come back from work early and didn’t think much of it.
Once inside, she went to her room and realized that something was wrong. Her bedroom window had been smashed, and there was broken glass everywhere. She immediately took a step back and ran toward the phone to call her mom.
But to her horror, the cable had been cut off. Before she had time to understand what was happening, she heard someone knocking at the door.
Jeannette turned around and saw a stranger behind the screen. Scared and confused, she reluctantly opened it. “When he was asking me questions, he was kind of peeking inside, trying to see who was in there,” she remembered.
“And that started making me feel really uncomfortable, and I started slowly closing the sliding door. I got scared because I felt a really bad vibe from him.”
He put his hand in his waistband, opened the door, grabbed her, and took her to her brother’s room. He threw her on the bed and took off her pants. Out of respect for Jeannette, the details of the assault will not be covered here, as they are extremely graphic.
But what happened in that room would mark her forever.
After he was done, her attacker handcuffed her and tied her legs together. He then carried her to his car, which was parked in the garage. There, the man tried to open the garage door but couldn’t lift it more than a few inches before he saw another vehicle stopping right in front of the garage.
From the back seat, Jeannette recognized her mother’s car.
“My brother crawled under the garage when it opened a few inches,” she said, “and the first thing I told him was to run.” But her attacker was already alerted. He got out of the car and started walking toward him.
At only fifteen, Paul knew he wouldn’t stand a chance, but he chose to fight him anyway. He grabbed a screwdriver from the counter and ran at him. The man immediately disarmed him and started punching him in the face over and over.
Restrained by the handcuffs and the rope around her leg, Jeannette couldn’t do anything except watch in horror as the man dragged her brother inside the house.
As soon as they entered, they came face to face with Roselia, Jeannette’s mother. She attempted to fight the man and successfully separated him from her son. Then Paul rushed toward the kitchen cabinet and pulled out a frying pan from it.
He tried to help his mom, but once again, the man disarmed him before he could do anything and turned the improvised weapon against Roselia, striking her repeatedly until she fell to the ground.
“I remember hearing my mom screaming, and then it went quiet,” Jeannette recalled. “I couldn’t hear much after that. And then I see the man rushed back into the garage and into the car, and when I seen blood on his face, I was like, ‘Did you ππΎππ them?’
And he just started laughing, and I just started to cry. I didn’t know if he had killed them. I didn’t know if they were there anymore.
With the blood on his face, I was just thinking that they were gone. My family was gone.”
Driving like a madman, Jeannette’s kidnapper cut through some of her neighbor’s bushes. Fighting through her restraints, she managed to turn around and take one last look at her house before they turned the corner. She felt an overwhelming feeling of relief when she made eye contact with Roselia running amok behind the car.
Her face was heavily wounded and covered in blood, but at least she was alive. Not far behind her, brother Paul was painfully limping towards some bystanders, waving his arm in the air and screaming for help.
As the car passed the corner, Jeannette started to scream at the other drivers passing by, slamming her shoulder against the window in an attempt to catch their attention. But her undertaking didn’t go unnoticed. Her attacker immediately grabbed the screwdriver from earlier and violently attacked her.
After being hit twice, she moved out of his reach.
“I just remember sliding down, laying there, and looking up at the ceiling of the car,” she said, “and just thinking to myself, ‘I’m not gonna make it. I’m gonna die.'”
Back at the house, after the police arrived, Roselia was refusing to get into the ambulance. She was trying to explain everything that happened to the detective and the other officers, but her condition kept getting worse by the minute, and her panicked state didn’t do much to help. So after they secured Paul, they had to force her onto a stretcher against her will.
They were both sent to the nearest hospital.
“My mother, I don’t care what happened to you. I don’t care what happens to me. I can’t do anything.
I can’t protect my kids.”
With their only witnesses gone, the police had barely any information to work with from the get-go. They knew that Jeannette had been kidnapped and that someone had broken into the house, cut the phone cords, and attacked the family before leaving with her. But other than that, all they had was the crime scene.
“One of the first things that I did notice in the garage was a lot of blood,” one investigator recalled. “I knew at that point this was a very violent crime. You start thinking, ‘Are we going to bring her home alive?'”
Heather Randall, the detective assigned to the case, initially thought that maybe some of the blood around the kitchen and the garage belonged to Jeannette. As her forensic team grabbed samples and examined the scene, she also called in handlers and bloodhounds to get the search started as soon as possible. But sadly, this didn’t lead them very far, since neither Jeannette nor her attacker were injured during the initial attack.
As this was happening, she also noticed a security camera in the driveway of one of the neighbors. By reviewing the footage it had captured in the last hour, they were able to establish a rough timeline of the events. Thirty minutes before Jeannette arrived, her attacker smashed her bedroom window and burglarized the house.
He then went back to his car and waited for Jeannette to arrive. Afterward, he followed her and knocked at the door. He then assaulted her in the bedroom for almost thirty minutes, at which point they headed to the garage.
Meanwhile, Paul and Roselia made it to the house in the last bit of the recording. In that final moment, they can clearly hear Roselia and Paul screaming for help.
Randall was mainly interested in one particular moment in the footage: the moment when the attacker’s car was right in front of the camera. In California, it is mandatory to have either a name, a license plate number, or a phone number tied to the perpetrator to issue a statewide Amber Alert. “It’s heartbreaking,” Randall said.
“You have the evidence right there. It’s so close, and yet you need just a little bit clearer video.”
Before she was able to fall back on Paul and Roselia, she alerted the media, hoping that even without an Amber Alert, maybe the population would mobilize itself anyway and spread the word about the disappearance. Together with her department, she got service helicopters in the air with loudspeakers calling out Jeannette’s name and gave press conference after press conference, just to make sure Jeannette’s name was on everyone’s mind in San Jose.
“It puts a thousand more sets of eyes out on the street,” Randall explained. “We knew it was extremely important to push the information out to the public, give them a picture of Jeannette, make sure that flyers were flooded throughout the city.”
Along the way, Jeannette kept mental notes of every turn they made, hoping she would be able to find her way home if she ever escaped. After a short ride, the car suddenly stopped. The man drove into the garage of a large white house.
He opened the door, picked her up, and carried her inside. There, he went up the stairs to the second floor and opened a locked door. Behind it was a very small room with a TV, a little window, a bed, and a bathroom.
He threw her on the ground and approached her with a menacing look. After each assault, he would clench her wrists to the shower head using a pair of handcuffs, run the water, and leave her there for a while. “I started to break down and cry,” she remembered.
“And that was my only safe place, was the shower. Because every time he left me in the shower, it was when he didn’t touch me. He wouldn’t hurt me, or he wouldn’t rape me.”
The next morning, the aftermath of the kidnapping took its toll. While the rest of the Tamayo family gathered around Roselia in San Jose, the police asked some of the family members to take part in the public address. “In the morning, he was watching the news again,” Jeannette said.
“My cousin was talking to me through the news. She was saying, ‘Jeannette, if you can hear us, just know that be strong, girl. We’re looking for you.
Just don’t give up.’ That gave me hope. That gave me the strength.
Either I’m going to fight to get out of here, or die trying.”
During her second day of captivity, Jeannette started to plan out what would be her best course of action against her abductor. “Because my life was at risk, I said to myself, I have to have a conversation with him so he gains my trust.” So she tried to ask him the most casual question she could think of.
“I remember asking him, ‘Where are you from?'”
Her attacker turned around with a dubious look on his face. He stood up, looked her straight in the eyes, and for the first time since he kidnapped her, smiled. An intense feeling of disgust filled her chest.
At that moment, she wished she could have spit at his face, stabbed him in the back with his screwdriver, or any other act of retaliation one could think of. But instead, she listened to her instinct. She smiled back, trying to look as innocent as possible.
She then asked him if she could get a glass of water. He handcuffed her and, for the first time, left her alone in the room while he went down the stairs to go get it. Now by herself, she started to nervously tinker with the handcuffs, since she had noticed that the lock didn’t require any key.
It was mechanical.
“I remember feeling with my fingers a little button and a latch,” she said. “I realized that if I move the latch one way and pressed that button, the handcuffs would release.”
Now freed, she knew she only had a minute to think of something useful. Something that could either save her or maybe help the police find the culprit if she ended up getting murdered. “My brother and I would always watch CSI, Law and Order,” she explained.
“And the detectives on the shows would always look for clues.”
Swiftly, she grabbed the watch the man had left on the nightstand. Then she rushed to the other side of the room, where the man had placed a few toys for her to play with. She grabbed a little clay turtle out of them.
Finally, she ran by the bathroom and grabbed her underwear. She remembered that the CSI cast often used the victim’s underwear in sexual assault cases, and she wanted him to be punished for what he did to her.
But soon enough, her investigation was cut short as she began to hear the heavy footsteps of her kidnapper walking up the stairs. She jumped back on the bed with the handcuffs on. “Once he walked through the door, he just looked at me,” she recalled.
“And in my mind, I was hoping, ‘Please don’t touch me,’ because I had things on me that I was afraid that he might find.”
On the third day, Jeannette’s family was devastated by the lack of progress the case had made. Despite the incredible amount of effort pulled by Randall, the police still had nothing on hand that could lead to her location. When the police tried to tell Roselia that past the 48-hour mark most kidnapped children are never found, she refused to listen.
“Very, very sad, because I was scared. My daughter, she’s a little kid. She cannot be gone,” Roselia said through her tears.
“I asked the officers, ‘What happened with my daughter?’ When my daughter came, I say maybe never. And screaming and screaming a lot.
My dad, I don’t see for three days. I don’t feel comfortable because I don’t protect her. I don’t protect the family.
I don’t feel good.”
It is at this point that Jeannette became completely numbed to her kidnapper’s assaults. Her only impulse was to stay strong and stick to her strategy. She needed to continue to manipulate him.
This was her only chance at survival.
“My befriending was working,” she said. “He asked me, ‘Are you hungry?’ And I looked at him and I said, ‘Yeah.’
He gave me his cell phone. He had a cell phone with him, and he made me call for pizza. He gave me the phone number of the cell phone that he had, and I gave it to the man.
The man on the other side of the phone said, ‘Can I get your address?’ He told me the address.”
And just like she did with the movement of the car two days ago, she memorized all of it. If she ever got away, she wanted to be sure she would be able to take him down afterward.
Eventually, someone rang the doorbell, and her kidnapper left the room for a minute. When he came back, he had a smile on his face. He put the pizza on the floor, and on top of the box there was a missing person flyer with her face on it.
He then told her that he would get rid of her tonight before leaving the room.
Once he closed the door behind him, she threw away the pizza and started to grab all the evidence she could. She then stuffed all of it inside the pizza box and hid it under the bed.
When he came back, he grabbed a pillow and started smothering her with it. Gasping for air, she tried to push her face against the side, but the man was too strong. As the lack of oxygen started to take its toll, she felt an immense rush of adrenaline running through her body, and in one final push, she successfully slid her face to the side enough so that she was able to take one last breath.
“About five seconds later, after I got some air, he pulled the pillow off,” she said, “and he asked me, ‘Do you want to take a shower?'”
When she came out of the shower, she quickly dressed up and made sure the pieces of evidence she had gathered earlier were still in her pockets. She then heard someone knocking loudly at the door downstairs. She wanted to scream, but her kidnapper immediately jumped on her and put his hands over her mouth.
Afraid that he would try to ππΎππ her again, she calmed down and waited for the person at the door to leave.
“He was sitting in the room for a while,” she remembered, “and afterwards, when he heard that it was all quiet, that’s when he took me downstairs into the garage. It was all dark.”
He then forced her into his car, put her back in handcuffs, and started driving. The ride was long, and Jeannette couldn’t stop crying and screaming. Midway through it, she took a second to calm herself down in an attempt to make some sense of what had happened to her so far.
“I remember just crying to myself and just saying, ‘Did the best I could.’ I was just preparing myself for my own death.”
But even then, she hadn’t fully given up yet. Along the way, she once again did her best to remember every turn they took, but they rode for over thirty minutes, making it far more difficult than the first time. After a while, the car approached the neon-lit parking lot of a liquor store not far from the highway.
The car stopped.
“And as soon as he stopped the car, he grabbed me by my hair,” Jeannette recounted. “When I looked around, I was like, ‘Where are we?’ And he was like, ‘I’m letting you go.’
And when he grabbed me by the back of my head, by my hair, he pulled me towards him. He was like, ‘If you ever tell anybody what I did, or who I am, or anything about me, I will come back for you, and I will ππΎππ your family, and I will ππΎππ you too.'”
As her kidnapper left, she ran toward the liquor store. She couldn’t believe she had succeeded. She somehow gained his trust.
These thoughts and emotions flooded her mind, and before she knew it, she was face to face with the cashier.
“I was just all kinds of emotions in one,” she said. “And I remember the gentleman that was behind the counter looking at me and asking me, ‘Are you okay?’ And then he said, ‘You’re the little girl from TV.'”
The man behind the counter didn’t hesitate. He handed her the phone, and when he realized she was distraught, he picked it back up and called 911. “Okay, here’s the phone,” he said.
But when she started dialing the phone, she was panicking, scared. She didn’t know how to dial the number.
Once the San Jose police got word that Jeannette had been located in East Palo Alto, they immediately reached her. Detective Randall was overjoyed to finally see the little girl with her own eyes. But in the back of her mind, she knew they needed to act quickly if they ever wanted to get their hands on the culprit.
“I walked up to her, and I said, ‘Hello, Jeannette. My name is Heather, and I’m here to help you,'” Randall recalled. “And before I really said anything else, she let me know that she had some evidence in her pocket.”
She pulled the toys, her underwear, the kidnapper’s watch, and other items out of her pockets. Shocked to see how clever the little girl was, Randall asked her if she had anything else that could help them catch him. Jeannette asked for a sheet of paper and drew the house, bits of the address, his exact phone number, and every other piece of information she could remember from her time with the kidnapper.
Noticing how knowledgeable she was, Randall asked her a decisive question. “I asked her, ‘Do you think you can find his house?’ And she said, ‘I think I can.’
And she said that she could direct us by saying right or left, right or left.”
While the police were heading back to San Jose to look for the man’s house, another officer started to call every pizza place in the area to see if they could match the phone number to a complete address. But before they knew it, they were already closing in on the place, as Jeannette shuddered with excitement in the back of the patrol car.
“I felt brave,” she said. “I think that’s why I stood up in the back of the car and started yelling and saying, ‘That’s it.'”
A few minutes later, Randall received a confirmation from the pizza place that this was in fact the right address. So she ordered a tactical team and a canine squad to raid the home.
“Our SWAT team then put a plan in place to go and take him into custody,” Randall explained. “They had a layout of the home from Jeannette, and they went in and were able to determine that he was hiding up in the attic.”
The suspect, David Montiel Cruz, attempted to evade arrest and threatened the officers inside the house. So they unleashed the dogs at him. He suffered multiple injuries on his arms and was escorted outside of the house.
Inside, Heather also found the evidence-filled pizza box under the bed.
Police said they knew little about the background of the suspect. “He was arrested at this house early yesterday morning,” one official stated. The District Attorney’s Office filed nine felony charges against Alvarez, including sexual assault, burglary, forcible lewd acts, rape, battery, and a special circumstance.
After the arrest, Roselia was called, but emergency services needed to get Jeannette into the ER as soon as possible. After all, she had been stabbed, and the wounds had yet to be treated. So Roselia and Paul followed them and finally got reunited with her when she was stabilized.
“I remember them taking me to the hospital, running tests on me,” Jeannette said. “I remember opening the door and seeing my mom, and her face was so bad, like she didn’t even look like my mom. I think she touched my mom’s face.
She said, ‘You’re hurt.’ You know, she was so brave. She didn’t care about herself.
She was worried about us.”
“You’re everything to me, you and Paul,” Roselia told her daughter. “Yeah, very happy, because my daughter was recovered. It was like a second time for me.”
The following years have not passed easily for Jeannette. For a time, she dealt with her personal pain on her own. She would never leave the house, stuck in the clutches of a paralyzing fear of men and the outside world.
But when she was fifteen years old, after six years of therapy, something clicked. She finally decided to face her fear and do something about it.
Twelve years later, TV producers reunited her with Heather Randall, the detective who, with a little help from one clever nine-year-old, put an end to the rampage of David Montiel Cruz and put him behind bars for life.
“So good to see you,” Randall said warmly. “I never really got the chance to come back and like tell you guys thank you for everything that you did. Like, I really appreciate it.”
“You are strong. You’re smart. What happened was you were amazing.
You were brave, and that’s why you’re here today.”
Even if her trauma hindered her childhood, she didn’t let it take over her life as an adult. Today, she decided to follow in Heather’s footsteps and study law enforcement. Her goal is to one day be a detective and help her community in the same way Heather helped her.
And on top of that, she also wants to become a voice for the missing and every victim of violence.
“Everybody has a story,” Jeannette said, “and no matter what life throws at us, no matter what obstacles, we’re all fighters, and we all have the ability to keep going. I turned my fear into courage. I got my family back.”
