Richard Pridgen: North Carolina Man Sentenced To Life For Raping 9-Year-Old Girl


Richard Pridgen, a North Carolina man, was sentenced on Tuesday to 50 to 61 years in prison after he was convicted of the rape of a 9-year-old girl. According to My Fox 8, Richard was convicted of rape charges that date back to 2011. Following his trial, he was found guilty of first-degree rape of a child by an adult offender, first degree sex offense with a child by an adult offender, and two counts of indecent liberties. Pridgen is a resident of the city of Winston-Salem in North Carolina.

The origins of the case date back to June 2011 when police officers from the Winston-Salem Police Department first received complaints about the 44-year-old Pridgen engaging in sexual acts with a 9-year-old girl. The complaint was filed by the girl’s mother who surprisingly, was dating Pridgen at the time.

Following an investigation by the police, they found enough evidence to suggest that Richard Pridgen had engaged in sexual acts with the 9-year-old girl “over an extended period of time”. The girl’s mother was in the dark all the while. It is still unclear how she came to know about Richard’s actions and decided to file the complaint against him.

Following the filing of the complaint and the commencement of the investigation, Richard disappeared and went in hiding. It was nearly two years later in April 2013 that Pridgen was finally arrested. He was nabbed by the police in Fredericksburg, Virginia and was eventually extradited back to North Carolina where he awaited trial. He was also asked to furnish a $500,000 bond. His trial eventually started on April 15, 2015, and the jury found him guilty on all counts. Pridgen is likely to spend the rest of his life in prison.

Pridgen’s conviction came close on the heels of an eerily similar case in North Carolina in which another man identified as Eliazar Juan Mendoza, 38, of Kannapolis was sentenced to at least 120 years in prison. He was convicted by a jury for raping and sexually assaulting a girl for over a five-year period. In that case, too, the young girl was sexually assaulted since the age of 9. Mendoza was eventually found guilty of five counts of first-degree rape, two counts of first-degree sex offense, four counts of taking indecent liberties with a minor, and two counts of felony child abuse involving a sex act.

In related news, the Inquisitr had earlier this month reported about the bizarre case of a Pennsylvania mom who let her new husband rape her teenage daughter.

[Image Via MyFox8]

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