Serial groper gets one year for failing to register
A 60-year-old man with a decades-long history of groping women was sentenced Monday to one year in prison for failing to register as a sex offender after his latest stint in jail.
Lonnie Sturdivant, who has no permanent address, pleaded guilty in November to a felony charge of failure to register. He was sentenced by Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Michael J. Holbrook, who could have sent him to prison for up to 18 months.
Holbrook approved Sturdivant for entry in an intensive treatment program while incarcerated, although it will be up to Sturdivant to apply and the prison system to decide if he’s an appropriate candidate. If he completes the program, which would address what Holbrook called Sturdivant’s “compulsions,” he could be released from prison early. However, he would be monitored by the parole board for as many as three years.
Sturdivant also is scheduled for a hearing next week in Municipal Court on misdemeanor charges of sexual imposition and aggravated trespassing for incidents in which he is accused of groping one woman in the Capital University library and two women at a bar near the Ohio State University campus.
He was released from the county jail on Sept. 19 after serving one year for his most recent string of convictions for groping women. He failed to comply with a requirement that he register as a sex offender within three days of his release.
Just two days after Sturdivant was back on the streets, a Capital student told campus police that he had grabbed her buttocks twice as she was studying on the second floor of the Blackmore Library. Three hours after that incident, two Ohio State students reported that he fondled them on the buttocks in the Out-R-Inn bar on Frambes Avenue.