GWINNETT COUNTY, Ga. — New testimony from police in a Gwinnett County courtroom is revealing the way a local teenager was allegedly kidnapped while on a walk, then trapped inside a tattoo shop.
Channel 2 Gwinnett County Bureau Chief Matt Johnson reported when tattoo shop owner Carlos Diaz was arrested, allegedly for kidnapping the teen, sexually assaulting her in his shop, then tattooing her without consent.
When the incident was first reported in May, the community around the shop told Channel 2 Action News they were in shock and couldn’t believe it.
Police told Johnson that the business owner wasn’t the most cooperative at first as the investigation began.
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Officers went to Diaz Tattoo Arts in May after getting a call from the teenager’s boyfriend.
Police told Johnson that the girl had been walking when Diaz is accused of forcing her into his van, taking her to his shop, then tattooing her stomach in the middle of the night.
The teen was able to secretly text her boyfriend, who called the police and they went to the shop.
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On Tuesday, Channel 2 Action News learned more details, with officers testifying that the case only got more disturbing after they got to the tattoo shop.
“He tried to close and lock the door,” Ofc. J. Ortiz, Gwinnett County Police Department, said on the witness stand. “I forced him to stop.”
The officer said he was answering a girl’s text that she was trapped inside a tattoo shop.
Diaz has now faced a judge, accused of abducting a teenage girl he’d just met.
“She was just walking randomly and he randomly noticed her and stopped and started talking to her. so everything’s random? No previous contact,” Ortiz said in court.
The 51-year-old is accused of forcing the girl into a sex act in a back room of his shop, then tattooing her stomach around 1 a.m.
“While he was doing what he was doing, she was texting her boyfriend and her friend, saying that she was there against her will, that she wanted to leave,” Ortiz said.
But in court, Diaz’s attorney pressed the officer on whether the girl was being held against her will.
Prosecutors said Diaz was a danger, and the judge on the case agreed. Diaz will stay in jail on kidnapping, trafficking and sex charges.
The community around the shop says they’re still trying to make sense of the charges and the man they know.
“We really want to think that’s not true,” Lupe Correa, who works at Flow Land Flowers next door to Diaz’s shop, told Johnson. “But again, it needs to get investigated.”
Diaz’s attorney is still working to get him a bond on a different day, citing his lack of any previous felony convictions.
For now, he’s being held without bond.
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