Father admits abusing daughter

WEST CHESTER >> A 16-year-old girl sat in a courtroom in the Chester County Justice Center and listened as the man who had terrorized and brutalized her over an 18-hour period last summer — force feeding her drugs, threatening to kill her, and raping and sexually abusing her — pleaded guilty to multiple charges that could see him sent to prison for more than 50 years.

The defendant, incredibly, is the girl’s own father.

Common Pleas Court Judge Jeffrey Sommer on Thursday accepted pleas of guilty to charges including rape, involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, aggravated indecent assault, kidnapping, possession of child pornography, possession of a controlled substance, and endangering the welfare of children from the man, who stood before him dressed in a prison T-shirt and pants.

The 32-year-old man had lived in Royersford until his arrest.

In the plea proceeding, he admitted that he had sexually assaulted his daughter at two locations in the northern part of the county for hours, at one point taking photos of her while she was naked and telling her that he intended to sell them to others. He was arrested by police in Montgomery County after dropping the girl off at home, where she took a woman there aside and told her what had happened.

MediaNews Group does not identify the victims of sexual assault unless they give their approval. It is withholding the name of the man accused in the case to protect the identity of the girl, who attend the proceeding on Thursday with her mother and an advocate from the Chester County Crime Victims Center.

Sommer said he would sentence the man at a later date after the completion of a pre-sentencing report by county probation officials.

Assistant District Attorney Erin O’Brien, of the DFA’s Child Abuse Unit, said that the maximum sentence allowable by law for the crimes the man pleaded guilty to was 56 to 112 years in state prison, plus a lifetime requirement to register as a sex offender. She told Sommer her of

fice had not yet decided whether to press for the maximum term in their sentencing recommendation.

The man and his attorney, Assistant Public Defender Meredith Copeland, had listened to O’Brien as she recited the facts of the case the girl had reported to police.

At about 9:45 p.m. on Aug. 16, the man picked the girl up at a fast food restaurant where she worked in Audubon, Montgomery County. He then drove her to a spot along the Schuylkill River Trail in East Pikeland, where he told her, “You are either going to make tonight a good night or a bad night.”

She said her father demanded that she snort methamphetamine, and then forced her to take off all her clothes. When she did, he took photographs of her with his cell phone, telling her that if she did not cooperate he would kill her. When he began molesting her, she tried to run away, but he grabbed her by the hair and pulled her back to his car, O’Brien said.

The man then drove from the trail to a wooded spot police later determined was off Zieber Road in East Coventry. There, the man sexually abused the girl multiple time, raping her and forcing her to perform oral sex on him. He restrained her with the car’s seat belts, all the while recording what he was doing to her on his cell phone. She repeatedly asked him to stop, but he did not.

According to the events laid out by O’Brien, the sexual assaults took place throughout the night and into the early morning hours of Aug. 17. At some point when the man decided to leave, the car became stuck in the mud, so he and the girl were forced to walk back to Royersford before getting a ride back to her home in Norristown.

Police in Montgomery County arrested the man after the girl was able to describe her ordeal to a woman at her home, who called 911. The girl was taken to Abington Hospital for treatment.

When he was arrested, the man’s cell phone was confiscated. A forensic examination of its content was performed by Chester County Detectives. They recovered several thousand still photos depicting child sexual exploitation and examples of child pornography. They also found the photos that the man had taken of his daughter when he was abusing her.

Investigators were able to track down the man’s car and recover the girl’s clothes and underwear.