Sex offender charged in obscene phone calls, threats from jail

Kim Smith

Friday, Sept. 20, 2002 | 9:26 a.m.

A registered sex offender who was acquitted last month on sexual assault charges is now being held on $8 million bail on 19 felony counts of coercion.

Chief Deputy District Attorney Doug Herndon said Justice of the Peace Doug Smith set the unusually high bail in the Vincent Mark Santana case Wednesday.

Herndon said the coercion counts stem from bizarre phone calls Santana, 44, was allegedly making from the Clark County Detention Center while awaiting trial in his rape case.

All of the phone calls were made to Southern California residents at random, Herndon said.

"He made literally hundreds and hundreds of calls," Herndon said. "In the 19 cases we charged him with, he kept women on the phone by making threats. He would tell them he was next door and that if they hung up on him he would kill them."

Once Santana persuaded the women to stay on the phone, Herndon said Santana would force them to imagine him raping them and forced them to describe the scene.

Other times, Herndon said Santana asked the women sexually explicit questions and demand they engage in sexually explicit conversations.

Attempts to reach Santana's attorney for comment were unsuccessful.

Although calls made from the jail are collect calls, many of Santana's alleged victims accepted the charges assuming a loved one had been arrested, Herndon said. In other cases, Santana spoke over the jail recording and pretended the recording was a joke.

All jail phone calls are recorded, but corrections officers didn't realize what Santana was doing until they went back to listen to phone calls during an unrelated investigation, Herndon said.

Santana was connected to the recordings after officers compared the voice on the obscene recordings with recordings made of Santana's legitimate calls, Herndon said.

In many instances, corrections officers noticed Santana dialed phone numbers sequentially, Herndon said.

The rape scenario Santana forced one woman to describe sounds remarkably like the sexual assault described by a Las Vegas prostitute last month, Herndon said. In that case, the jury found Santana not guilty.

The jury acquitted Santana on two sexual assault counts and a first-degree kidnapping charge for which he could have faced a life sentence. Jurors said the alleged victim in the case was less than credible.

Smith scheduled a preliminary hearing in the coercion case for Oct. 2, Herndon said.

Santana, who has spent 23 of the last 25 years in prison for sex-related crimes, already faces trial for allegedly failing to update his address on the sex offender registry in Nevada and for allegedly forging prescriptions.