Montana man gets 200 years for impregnating 11-year-old
theGRIO REPORT - A Montana man has been charged and convicted of impregnating an 11-year-old girl who was in his care.
A Montana man has been charged and convicted of impregnating an 11-year-old girl who was in his care.
Fifty-five-year-old Mikeal Shane Pruett of Stevensville was sentenced to 200 years in prison. He will not be eligible for parole until he is 105-years-old.
After considering the evidence in Pruett’s case, the judge said he was uninterested in extending probation, reports the Missoulian. “You seem to lack any semblance of a conscience,” Ravalli County District Judge Jeffrey Langton said.
In June, the 11-year-old discovered the pregnancy after a doctor’s visit. “I didn’t know what pregnant felt like,” she said of the discovery. “So I didn’t know.”
After the pregnancy was discovered, Val Widmer, director of Emma’s House, a children’s advocacy facility, interviewed her. During her first visit, the girl told Widmer she had been impregnated by a boy she met at a county fair. Widmer pointed out that the timing was impossible for her story to be true. He interviewed her again after the girl gave birth in August, and the girl named Pruett as the father. Pruett was not present for the second interview.
“Instead of him doing the wrong thing, he would come in and tell me what to say,” the girl admitted. “He didn’t want to get caught.”
The girl said that Pruett, who was her guardian and the guardian of her 9-year-old sister, would come into her room at night and molest her. She said that he would leave and pout on the couch if she rebuffed him. “He’d wait to see if I could come out and look at him and feel sorry for him, but I wouldn’t,” she recalled.
Pruett eventually began to molest the youngest sister as well. Before that, the sister would sometimes wake up while Pruett was molesting the 11-year-old and watch “through a peeking hole.”
Ravalli County Attorney Bill Fulbright said that Pruett’s case fell under Jessica’s Law, which requires at least 25 years in jail and 100 years’ sentencing. “The only real question is how much should be suspended,” he said of the sentence.
Fulbright pointed out a long pattern of “eerily similar” offenses outside of Montana. “In my view, over the course of his life, he has set no boundaries when it comes to committing sexual offenses,” he said.
Pruett was charged with two 100-year sentences, to be served consecutively, and has been classified as a tier 3 sex offender.
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