Child rapist gets 24-year sentence
A one-time bank robber convicted of raping a young girl was sentenced Wednesday to serve no less than two dozen years in prison.
But the victim, who was 5 years old when first assaulted, said her punishment is endless and has caused her to routinely, purposely cut herself and to give her serious thought about ending her own life.
“I felt dirty and disgusting ... I wrote multiple suicide notes. I chose a date ... All I wanted to do was die, I was so done with living life. My head literally felt like a black hole,” the girl, now 15, told Butler County Judge William Shaffer in court.
According to testimony during a jury trial in October, Christopher M. Stanford, now 38, of Portersville began assaulting the girl in 2005 when she was a kindergartner and living in Butler Township.
The assaults continued for about seven years. But the allegations didn’t surface until 2013 just as Stanford was finishing a 41-month federal prison sentence for robbing a bank, and he was chatting up the girl’s mother with hopes of reconciling an earlier romance.
At trial, Stanford alleged the girl fabricated the allegations to stop the romance from resuming. And during sentence court, Stanford again asserted his innocence and said he’s already planning an appeal.
He alleges the girl and her brother changed their stories during a course of interviews, and there’s evidence that he has not been able to see that could be exculpatory.
Additionally he claims he didn’t get a fair trial because “two jurors fell asleep.”
The jury convicted Stanford of endangering the brother, but acquitted him of raping the boy.
“He absolutely stole the childhood of both these victims,” Assistant District Attorney Patricia McLean, who prosecuted the case, said Wednesday in urging the judge to impose a lengthy sentence.
Additionally, a member of the state’s Sexual Offender Assessment Board on Wednesday testified that she reviewed the case and determined Stanford is a pedophile.
Shaffer, who presided over the trial, declared Stanford a sexually violent predator who must register his whereabouts for the rest of his life. And he fashioned Stanford’s prison sentence of 24 to 31 years.
As for the girl, who attended court with her mother, brother and other family members, she says her suicide attempt was thwarted by a counselor who sent her to Western Psychiatric for help “three days before I planned to kill myself.”
She said she still suffers depression and post traumatic stress syndrome and occasionally thinks about suicide.
“I’m 15 and terrified of men,” she told the judge.
About two years ago, the girl said she learned how to cut herself and has been doing it ever since.
“I’m addicted to the burning feeling that it gives me. The warming of the blood rushing down my arms,” she told the judge, noting that she often promises family members she will stop.
“I promise every single time. Even though I know it’s probably a lie. I constantly promise everyone, my mom, my brother, my therapist, my best friend.
“But I never stop. The worst part is, I don’t feel bad about lying because this is my coping mechanism.”
The girl told the judge that it was important for her to hear the jury pronounce Stanford guilty.
“(But) it doesn’t take me back to being 5 years old,” she said. “It doesn’t set back time and give me a whole new childhood.”
