California Foster Father Sentenced to 6 Life Terms in Child Sex Trafficking Case: Hid Children for 10 Years Where They Were Chained, Raped, Tortured, and Starved

Jose Centeno of Rohnert Park, in Sonoma County, California, was sentenced to six consecutive life sentences last week for torturing, starving, raping and sodomizing his three foster children, whom he kept hidden from the public in cages for 10 years. I have covered a lot of these kinds of stories for more than a decade, and this one is vying for First Place in the most horrific and demonic stories that I have ever encountered. Jose Centeno and his wife Gina Centeno were both arrested in August of 2020, but Gina died in jail earlier this year while awaiting trial. When their arrest was made in 2020, it drew national attention, especially after it was discovered that one of the foster children had not been seen in about 10 years, Kaya Centeno, who is the only one that I could find a photo of online. The jury trial of Jose Centeno was conducted in July of this year (2024), and the details and testimonies that were presented in the courtroom literally traumatized the jury, as is to be expected, and as I have personally also experienced over the years from covering these types of cases. What these corporate media sources failed to report, however, was the back story about how this horror could have continued for so long with a state-licensed foster care family. A situation like this does not just happen by a rogue, rare exception to the foster care system. To get away with a child sex trafficking operation like this, there has to be complicity from local law enforcement, to the social service agencies that allow this to happen, and none of the corporate media reports even bothered to look into that. Nor did they bother to investigate why these children were taken away from their biological family in the first place. One of the articles I read while researching this story from Sonoma County today mentioned that there had also been a federal lawsuit filed in this case, but that it had been settled. It took me some time, but I found the lawsuit, and it has NOT been settled, but is still ongoing. This lawsuit provides a LOT more details, including suing all the people and government employees who were complicit with this child sex trafficking ring, and providing details that are even more horrible than what the corporate media is reporting.