On Wednesday, a man surnamed Casasola (34) was sentenced to 50 years in prison after being found guilty of raping his teenage stepdaughter and kidnapping her 9-month-old baby daughter.

The sentence was issued in the Cartago Province Court, where the three judges (Grettel Barahona, Magally Hernández, and Henry Segura), found that Casasola, who was the boyfriend of a woman surnamed Garcia, took advantage of his proximity with his girlfriend's daughter to rape her many times when she was 11 years old.

The girl got pregnant in November 2021 after being sexually assaulted by Casasola. Nine months after the crime, in July 2022, the teenager gave birth to a baby girl.

According to the court, a series of medical DNA tests confirmed with reasonable confidence that Casasola is the father of his stepdaughter's baby.


The judges concluded that Casasola kidnapped his newborn daughter in April 2023, when she was nine months old. The man's motivation for the crime was to avoid being convicted of being the child's biological father.


Casasola was arrested as the main suspect in the baby's kidnapping in April 2023 by agents from the Judicial Investigation Organization. Interpol also issued a yellow notice in search of the missing baby.


The infant is still missing.


The court sentenced Casasola to 79 years in prison, as requested by the Public Prosecutor's Office. However, Costa Rican rules limit the maximum jail term for anybody convicted of any crime to 50 years.  Therefore, Casasola must spend the next five decades in Cartago Prison.

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