Autistic girl ‘perfect victim’ for predator

A 14-year-old girl who was sexually abused by her mother’s boyfriend suffers from severe autism and is unable to speak.

“In (his) eyes, she was the perfect victim,” Crown attorney Brandon Trask said after the Timberlea man’s sentencing. “She wouldn’t be able to tell anybody what she was going through.”

Molesting the girl wasn’t enough for the 35-year-old man. He also posted pornographic photos of the abuse on a foreign website, where they were seen by Ontario Provincial Police officers, who alerted members of the Halifax Regional Police-RCMP internet child exploitation unit in March.

Police executed search warrants two days later at a pair of Timberlea addresses, arrested the man and charged him with a variety of offences.

Denied bail, he pleaded guilty in June to five charges – sexual assault, sexual exploitation of a person with a disability, making child pornography, distributing child pornography and unsafe storage of firearms.

He was sentenced recently in Halifax provincial court by Judge Patrick Curran, who imposed a prison term of seven years.

The judge deducted 231 days from the sentence as credit for the man’s remand time, leaving him with a net term of six years and 134 days. The man’s name is banned from publication to protect the identity of the victim.

“The offences that we’re dealing with today involve the abuse and degradation of a teenage girl suffering from significant disabilities,” the judge said.

“As bad as offences like this are, imagine how much worse it would be to a child who could not express what was happening to her ... and could not express to anyone just what it was that she was enduring . ... That’s a severely aggravating factor in my opinion.”

Curran decided on a sentence of four years for the sexual assault charge, two years concurrent for the sexual exploitation, one year consecutive for making child pornography, two years consecutive for distributing the material and one month concurrent for the weapons charge.