Serial groper facing new charges
No one familiar with the saga of serial groper Lonnie Sturdivant was surprised when he was charged with groping women in two separate incidents just three days after being released from the Franklin County jail.
“Unfortunately, it was predictable,” said Keith Durkin, a criminologist and sociologist at Ohio Northern University who studies sex offenders.
Sturdivant, 60, was released from jail on Tuesday after serving one year for the latest in a string of convictions for groping women.
He now faces misdemeanor sexual imposition charges for allegedly groping a student at Capital University’s library on Thursday night and two Ohio State University students at a campus-area bar early Friday morning.
He was arrested Friday afternoon on a warrant issued by Capital University police.
In addition to the three misdemeanor charges, Sturdivant is charged with a felony for failing to register as a sex offender within three days of his release from jail.
Capital University police also charged him with a misdemeanor count of aggravated trespassing because he was banned from the campus after a 2012 incident that was labeled “suspicious activity,” a university spokeswoman said Friday.
He also has been banned from the OSU campus and the COTA bus system for past incidents.
“It’s disturbing, but not surprising, considering this man’s history,” Prosecutor Ron O’Brien said of the latest charges. “Before he was released from jail, he had 16 incidents where he was arrested or charged.”
He is scheduled to be arraigned on Thursday in Franklin County Municipal Court on the latest charges. The sexual-imposition complaints show his address on Morse Road, just east of North High Street, although the felony complaint lists an old address for Faith Mission, a homeless shelter.
Because sexual imposition is a misdemeanor, Sturdivant rarely spends more than a few weeks or months in jail before he’s back on the streets.
In the Thursday incident, a Capital student told campus police that a man grabbed her buttocks twice as she was studying on the second floor of the Blackmore Library around 9:30 p.m. About three hours later, the OSU students said he fondled them on the buttocks in the Out-R-In Bar at 20 Frambes Ave.
One woman said she felt a hand slide under her buttocks while she was sitting on picnic table outside the bar. When she and another woman moved to another area at the bar, Sturdivant reportedly followed a few minutes later. The other woman then felt a hand slide under her buttocks. She jumped up and screamed, “What are you doing?” The woman asked staff to have him removed from the bar.
Columbus police say officers who encountered Sturdivant on Friday morning
were unable to book him into the jail because investigators did not witness the crime. In Ohio, certain misdemeanor crimes not witnessed by an officer can result only in a summons being issued for a court appearance. Sexual imposition is included in those crimes, according to investigators.
However, aggravated trespassing can lead to an arrest without being witnessed by an officer, which allowed Capital University police, who did not encounter Sturdivant, to issue a warrant.
Records show Sturdivant has been convicted at least six times for sexual imposition. Because of his prior convictions, he is listed as a tier three sex offender in Franklin County. That means he has to register with the sheriff’s office every 90 days for the remainder of his life. He also is required to register each time he changes his residence and place of employment.
The only hope of putting a stop to Sturdivant’s behavior would be to place him in an intensive, in-patient treatment program, said Ronald DeLong, a sex-offender treatment specialist and criminal-justice professor at the University of Dayton.
“Without a proper assessment and intensive treatment, he’s not going to stop,” DeLong said. “He’s going to have many more victims.”
That is the primary concern for Durkin, the Ohio Northern professor.
“We shake our heads at the strangeness of this offender,” he said, “but the thing that gets lost in all this is the safety of women.”