Thread: Man gets 35 years for raping daughter and killing their baby

Man gets 35 years for raping daughter and killing their baby
Thursday, April 26, 2007
BY GREG HANLON
JERSEY JOURNAL
The West New York man who pleaded guilty to raping his teenage daughter and ordering her to kill the two babies he fathered with her was sentenced to 35 years in prison yesterday.

The sentence was the maximum penalty allowable under a plea deal Jose Ventura, 46, reached with prosecutors.

Ventura, an illegal immigrant from El Salvador, was sentenced by state Superior Court Judge Kevin Callahan in Jersey City. Under law, he won't be eligible for parole until he serves at least 85 percent of his term, which is 29 years, nine months and 13 days.

"The cruel nature and circumstances of what you did, the heinous and cruel acts that you committed against your own flesh and blood, calls for the highest possible sentence that the law allows me," Callahan told an expressionless Ventura.

The defendant was clad in green jail garb and wearing a pair of headphones to hear a Spanish translation of Callahan's tongue-lashing and the rest of the proceedings.

Before the sentencing, E. Carl Broege, a public defender representing Ventura, described him as "a thought-diminished, cognitively impaired, under-socialized, base, primitive man."

Broege told the judge that Ventura once told a Corrections Department psychologist that he "would not have had sex with (his daughter) if she did not seduce me. I have fallen in love with her. I do not see her as my daughter, but rather as someone who I am in love with."

But Callahan was unmoved. "Your daughter was a captive of yours, there for your sexual gratification. You show no remorse for your daughter. You even took the opportunity to blame her," the judge said.

After Ventura gets out of prison at age 75 he will likely be deported to his native El Salvador, officials said. "I can't imagine that not happening," said his public defender, Carl Broege.

Ventura pleaded guilty to aggravated manslaughter, aggravated assault and two counts of aggravated sexual assault stemming from the sexual abuse he committed against his daughter, Lucila, now 18, officials said.

Prosecutors said Ventura began having sex with his daughter two weeks after she arrived from El Salvador five years ago and continued until two weeks before their second child was born in November 2005.

The abuse came to light on Nov. 13, 2005, when their second child was found crying at the bottom of an air shaft in the building they lived in. Lucila Ventura said her father ordered her to throw the baby down the shaft, prosecutors said.

The next day, police investigating the shaft found the remains of the baby the young woman tossed into the shaft a year earlier.

Lucila Ventura, who has been classified as borderline mentally retarded by the Ann Klein Forensic Center in West Trenton, has pleaded guilty to reckless manslaughter and aggravated assault and has been cooperating with authorities in the prosecution of her father, said Hudson County Assistant Prosecutor Michael D'Andrea.

She is currently being held in the medical wing of Hudson County jail in Kearny and will be sentenced by Callahan on May 10.


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Great family values!

How sick.

What wil be her immigration status?

Before the sentencing, E. Carl Broege, a public defender representing Ventura, described him as "a thought-diminished, cognitively impaired, under-socialized, base, primitive man."

Lots of them around