Lara Starr had just walked in through the door when she saw a masked man holding a gun inside her Woodland Hills home.
Starr assumed this was part of a game called Water Assassins that her son, a high school senior, played with his classmates.
“It wasn’t totally unusual for kids to be creeping around our house with big squirt guns,” she said.
Starr testified at a preliminary hearing Wednesday in a Van Nuys courtroom, where she described a bizarre and disturbing series of events that began the afternoon of March 3.
She, her son and husband were held captive by a man who forced them into a closet and boarded up the doors with plywood. Starr and her spouse testified that the man said he intended to empty their retirement accounts. If they resisted, he promised to burn down the house with them trapped inside.
The man eventually charged with kidnapping, robbing and threatening her family turned out to be no stranger to Starr. But when she first saw the person standing in her hallway dressed in a long sleeve white shirt, dark pants, balaclava and blue latex gloves, she had no idea who he was.
One of her son’s friends had taken the squirt gun game too far, she thought. Thinking she’d call his bluff, she turned to walk away.
Something hard crashed into the back of her head. The intruder shoved her against a wall and threw her to the ground.
“There was blood everywhere,” she said.
The intruder held out some zip ties. “Behave,” he said.
Starr slipped the ties around her wrists, and the intruder cinched them tight.
He dragged Starr to her feet and zip tied her to a chair inside a walk-in closet attached to the master bedroom. She asked what he wanted. Money, he said.
Starr told him where to find the keys to their safe, which held about $3,000 in cash belonging to her in-laws, who’d been displaced by the Palisades fire.
“Please,” she said, “take the cash and go.”
After dragging Starr’s son into the closet and zip tying him to another chair, the intruder offered to put a compress on her head, which was leaking blood.
He spoke in “a sort of Eastern European accent,” Starr testified, but lapsed at times into “other unidentified accents.” As they waited for her husband to return, the masked man rambled about himself.
He’d been smuggled through the “port of Atlanta” inside a shipping container, he said. Describing himself as a kind of indentured servant, he said he’d been “forced to work in a criminal enterprise, and if he didn’t, he would be killed,” Starr testified.
“He made a point of saying he knew a lot about us,” Starr recalled. The intruder said he’d watched the family’s comings and goings by hacking into a neighbor’s surveillance system that provided a view of their driveway. He also, oddly, knew the names of the people who lived in the house before Starr did.
Two hours crept by. Then Starr heard the sound of her husband punching in the code to their door and the click-clack of his cycling shoes on the floor.
“You can hear him walking through the house, trying to figure out what was going on,” she testified.
The intruder pointed a gun at the bedroom door, “waiting for him to turn the corner,” Starr said.
Craig Didden testified he was met with a gun pointed at his face.
“Relax,” the masked person holding the gun said.
That voice sounds familiar, Didden recalled thinking.
The intruder ordered Didden to send emails to his and his wife’s employers and his son’s school, explaining they’d be gone for the next few days. Didden testified that he tried his best to type with his wrists zip tied together while the man read over his shoulder.
It would take five days to transfer all of the money from their retirement accounts, the intruder told the family.
“He said he had a number of tools to get us to cooperate,” Starr testified, “but worst case-scenario, he’d leave us zip tied in the closet and burn the house down.”
When the suspect brought them snacks — bananas, beef jerky and sparkling water — Starr felt the ordeal had veered into the absurd. “It just seemed so incongruous to zip tie someone in their closet,” she said, “and then bring them a bottle of Perrier.”
Left in the darkened closet, Starr testified she heard the whir of an electric drill as the intruder boarded up the doors with sheets of plywood. After the house fell silent, they rifled through pockets of clothes inside the closet, finding a manicure kit and a ninja star inside a box of childhood mementos. Using these tools and a nail file that Starr had slipped in her pocket when she used the restroom, they cut the zip ties and came up with a plan.
Once the light peeked through a gap in the closet doors, Didden called out for water. Hearing nothing, he kicked the plywood off the doors and crawled out. The three climbed out of a bathroom window, scaled a fence in the backyard and banged on the window of a neighbor who called 911.
Starr and Didden walked through their home with officers from the Los Angeles Police Department. Starr testified her and her mother’s engagement rings were missing. So was a string of pearls she’d worn at her wedding and her great-grandfather’s pocket watch.
The doorjambs had been screwed shut and food was scattered around the kitchen. In trash cans in the kitchen and bathroom, detectives found ripped blue latex gloves, Deputy Dist. Atty. Catherine Chon said in court.
Police tested the gloves for DNA. After receiving the results, they arrested Rodolfo Christopher Gil — the son of Starr and Didden’s next-door neighbor.
Starr testified that she and Gil’s family, while “not terribly close,” were “pleasant neighbors.” She’d known Gil for the 15 years she’d lived next to his family.
“We share a driveway,” she said.
In a motion for bail, Gil’s attorney said the 35-year-old father of one has no “prior violent criminal history.” According to a tax return attached to the motion, Gil reported being self-employed and earned about $40,000 in 2024, including more than $13,000 in unemployment benefits.
His lawyer, Paul Geller, asked Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Diego Edber to dismiss the charges against Gil, saying they weren’t supported by evidence.
“It’s very possible this was a replica gun,” he told the judge.
Edber ruled he’d heard enough testimony for Gil to stand trial on 16 counts of kidnapping, assault, false imprisonment, burglary, robbery and criminal threats.
A sheriff’s deputy led Gil back to a jail cell in handcuffs as he nodded to his family in the courtroom audience.
It’s unclear if they still live next door to Starr and Didden.
