Rapist receives prison sentence
A former Penn Township man convicted earlier this year of raping and systematically molesting a teenage girl for years was sentenced Tuesday to a minimum of 12 years, four months in prison to a maximum of 24 years, eight months behind bars.
Matthew Parker, 38, of Minneola, Fla., was sentenced by county Judge William Shaffer. Parker's prison term will be followed by five years of probation, Shaffer ruled Tuesday.
The sentence comes after a jury of nine men and three women in February found Parker guilty of two felony counts of rape, one count each of felony aggravated indecent assault, corruption of minors and child endangerment and three counts of misdemeanor indecent assault.
At trial the victim, who is now 17, testified that Parker began telling her that he “wanted to have sex with me” in 2014, when she was 8 or 9 years old.
When she was 14, the victim testified, Parker's requests escalated to inappropriate touching, which occurred nearly every day for a year. Around the girl's 16th birthday, she testified, the assaults escalated again and Parker raped her twice in two weeks.
The girl reported the assaults in 2016 to officials at her school, with the help of a close friend. That touched off a report to the state's ChildLine abuse hotline and ultimately a police investigation, which found that Parker molested the girl starting in 2014, in assaults that took place in Penn Township, at a Mercer County campground, and during a trip to Florida in 2016.
The trial lasted about two days, and the jury deliberated for about four hours before returning a guilty verdict.
On Tuesday, Patricia McLean, first assistant district attorney, called the trial “difficult to listen to,” after two lengthy victim impact statements — one written by the victim and a second from her mother — were read in court.
In those statements, the girl and her mother both spoke about the emotional, psychological and financial impacts of Parker's abuse on their family.
The victim said she suffers from depression and a mild form of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder following Parker's assaults. She also wrote that she battled suicidal thoughts and struggled in school because of the abuse.
“Why work hard when all you await is death? That was my thinking,” the victim's statement read, in part.
The girl went on to say that her mental state has improved since she reported the abuse in 2016, and that she looks forward to “living her own life” and legally becoming an adult.
“Now he's (Parker) gone. I'm my own person now ... No matter what he's out of my life for good,” the girl's statement reads.
The victim's mother, in her own statement, recounted how Parker's abuse of her daughter resulted in emotional, psychological and financial ruin for her family.
“The shock was almost indescribable,” she said of learning about the abuse.
“There's no one aspect of life that hasn't changed,” her statement reads, in part. “We're starting completely over — and not with a clean slate, but with emotional and psychological damage.”
Parker declined to make a statement Tuesday, telling Shaffer that he wanted to “preserve his rights for (appeal).”
His defense attorney, Leland Clark, confirmed that Parker is planning to file an appeal, but said he did not have details of those plans and would not be representing Parker during the appeals process.
