A one-time bank robber convicted of raping a young girl is sentenced 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 Wednesday.

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.

The jury convicted Stanford of endangering the brother, but acquitted him of raping the boy.

Shaffer 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.