Hays County District Court Judge Joe Pool sentenced 44year-old Richard Santa Ana to a total of 218 years in prison after being found guilty of two counts of aggravated sexual assault of a child and one count of indecency with a child by sexual contact.
The sentence followed a bench trial that proved that Santa Ana had repeatedly drugged and sexually assaulted the teenage daughter of a friend. Evidence during the punishment phase included testimony from a previous victim that the defendant had sexually assaulted in 2007.
Despite the verdict, the defendant remained unremorseful. Judge Pool stated, “This gives notice to others in the community that we’re not going to accept this type of behavior.”
Judge Pool announced he was ordering the sentences to run consecutively, or “stacked,” requiring the first sentence to be served before the second sentence can begin, and the second to be served before the third begins. Santa Ana must also register as a sex offender for the rest of his life, and a lifetime protective order on behalf of the victim was put into place against him.
“This defendant had already shown he won’t be rehabilitated,” said lead prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney Abigail Whitaker, “We asked the Court to make sure he wouldn’t be able to reoffend again. Both of the girls who came forward and told their stories in this trial were extremely brave, and we are grateful we were able to get justice for them.”
The case was investigated by Kyle Police Department Detective Jerritt Bean and included scientific analysis by the Texas Department of Public Safety, the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification and NMS Labs.
