27 years for setting his girlfriend on fire
Starr Lamare said her face was so severely burned her kids were afraid of her after her boyfriend set her on fire over an argument at a coin laundry in San Francisco.
Some justice came on Thursday. After five years of pain and horror, her attacker, 27-year-old Dexter Oliver, was sentenced to 27 years in state prison for the Jan. 6, 2013, attack.
“You turned my world upside down,” Lamare, a 30-year-old mother of three, wrote in a victim impact statement before the sentencing. “My kids were afraid of me. It took two months for my baby to come to me. I was afraid to go outside, afraid to be around people.”
Lamare sat quietly in Judge Rene Navarro’s San Francisco courtroom, wiping away tears as Karima Baptiste of the district attorney’s Victim Services Division read the statement to Oliver. Most of Lamare’s face and hands remain scarred from the attack, scars she will have for the rest of her life.
“Life has been a struggle,” Lamare wrote. “I have to take medication every day. I’m afraid to pump my gas. The flick of a lighter makes me flinch. I can’t trust. I can’t live properly. You robbed me of those things.”
Oliver, who has three prior domestic violence convictions involving two other women, said nothing. He smiled as he walked into court and only looked over at his victim once, and without expression. He had pleaded guilty to the attempted murder of Lamare last November.
“He’ll have a long time to reflect on his heinous act,” Assistant District Attorney Sam Totah said after the hearing.
Prosecutors said Oliver attacked Lamare after an argument about clothes at a coin-operated laundry near their home in the Bayview.
Oliver filled up two baby bottles with gasoline, doused her and set her on fire. Police found Lamare screaming in the street at Hollister Avenue and Jennings Street, with life-threatening burns on her face and upper body.
Oliver was arrested in Oakland the day after the attack and charged with attempted murder and arson.
While she was treated at the Bothin Burn Center at St. Francis Memorial Hospital, Lamare’s case drew attention from Bay Area domestic violence victims’ advocates.
“It’s heinous. We’re lucky she survived,” said Beverly Upton of the San Francisco Domestic Violence Consortium. “We’re glad to see some justice in this case.”
Inspector John Keane with the San Francisco Police Department’s Victim Services Division has been working closely with Lamare over the past half-decade. He called the attack “one of the worst incidents of domestic violence I have seen in over 25 years.”
Lamare “is still recovering from this incident and is incredibly strong and determined,” he said Thursday.
Lamare said she’s ready to move on.
“You will no longer have power over me,” she wrote to her attacker. “All my hate I put in God’s hands.”