Posted on 04/24/2003 8:58:38 AM PDT by Hillary's Lovely Legs
A stay-at-home father who molested his 5-year-old stepson, a 6-year-old girl and two young nieces before fleeing San Diego in the early 1990s was sentenced Monday to 58 years in prison, 10News reported.
Clifford Dean Smith, (pictured left), 46, was convicted of 19 counts of child molestation on October 23. He will be 95 before he is eligible for release from custody.
Deputy District Attorney Tracy Prior said Smith married women with young children, then encouraged his wives to work outside the home.
"He orchestrated his own little molest factory," the prosecutor told the judge. "He molested every kid that came to him. He is the evil, the cancer, that has spread through these families."
An 18-year-old man testified during Smith's trial that his stepfather molested him several times starting in 1989 and threatened to kill him if he told anyone.
A 19-year-old girl testified that she was molested by Smith when she went over to his home to visit her then 5-year-old friend.
The young woman said she now fears men -- especially those with "five o'clock shadows" -- like Smith always had.
"I'm afraid that they're all out to hurt me," she said. "I hope you sit in prison and think about what you've done, until the day you die."
The girl eventually told her mother about the "touchings" and an investigation began, authorities said.
Prior said Smith also molested two nieces before leaving San Diego in 1991.
The prosecutor told the jury that Smith persuaded his wife to work two jobs so he could stay home and take care of their four children.
During the sentencing trial, Ella Cummings, one of the victim's mother and Smith's ex-wife, addressed the judge.
"And I just hope, Judge, that you will give him the maximum possible (sentence) so there won't be any other kids that will suffer or any other families that will go through this ... it's been terrible for my son, my family ... to go through the hurt, the shame and everything that he (Smith) has put us through," Cummings, (pictured right), said.
Smith faced a maximum sentence of 74 years in prison. He will be eligible for release from prison when he is 95 years old, 10News reported.
Smith was arrested on May 28, 2001, in Pima County, Ariz., on a San Diego warrant issued 10 years earlier.
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