SINGAPORE: A 71-year-old man who, over three decades, sexually abused 11 girls, including his daughter, his son’s two daughters and his four nieces, was sentenced to 21 years’ jail on Sept 17.
The other four victims were students from an enrichment centre he and his wife ran from 1997 to 2021.
The 11 victims were assaulted between 1990 and 2023 – some were as young as five or six.
During this period, he was sent to prison twice, in August 1999 and March 2020, for molestation and sexual exploitation offences committed against other victims.
But the offences involving the 11 victims came to light only in August 2023 after his granddaughters told their mother he had sexually assaulted them.
The man, who uses a wheelchair, now has a rare blood cancer known as myelofibrosis.
He cannot be caned as he is over 50, and he cannot be named due to a gag order to prevent the victims from being identified.
In sentencing the man, High Court judge Mavis Chionh said: “This was a tragic case of persistent sexual offending by a diagnosed paedophile against his own family members and students who trusted him.
“Despite having been caught, prosecuted and punished on two separate occasions prior to these proceedings before me, the accused in this case reoffended shortly after being released from his latest stint in prison.”
Chionh declined the defence’s request that she exercise judicial mercy or consider the man’s ill health as a significant mitigating factor.
“This is not a case where the humanitarian considerations supporting the exercise of judicial mercy should prevail over the interests of society,” said the judge, adding that retribution, protection of the public and deterrence weighed heavily in this case.
She noted the man’s offences were particularly heinous.
“The full extent of the accused’s offending is appalling,” she added.
Elderly predator
Noting the latest offences were committed in 2023, when the man was 68, the judge said: “Neither the accused’s age... nor the diagnosis of myelofibrosis in 2021 put a stop to his depraved criminal conduct.”
Chionh said there was no evidence to show imprisonment would cause him disproportionate suffering.
The judge also rejected the prosecution’s submission for a jail term of 32 to 36 years.
She said: “While I have no doubt that the present case is a most egregious one and that the accused’s conduct was reprehensible, (the sentence sought) is disproportionate to the accused’s overall criminality, especially when compared with like cases.”
The judge said a jail sentence of 26 years would be appropriate, citing two cases involving prolonged sexual offending against multiple young victims.
But she added that a downward adjustment was warranted to account for his reduced life expectancy due to his terminal illness, so that the sentence did not amount to a life sentence.
On July 24, he pleaded guilty to 10 charges in relation to six of the victims.
These included a charge of raping his daughter in 2005 when she was 15 and a charge of sexual assault by penetration committed against his older granddaughter in 2023, when she was seven years old.
The other charges are molestation, committing an obscene act involving a child, showing pornography to a child and unnatural sex.
The remaining 23 charges were considered during sentencing.
The man began sexually assaulting his daughter in 1997 when she was six to seven years old.
He kept telling her not to tell anyone what he did to her because the family would split up, and it would be her fault.
He raped her in 2005, after which he stopped sexually abusing her.
In 2023, two years after he was released from prison, he preyed on the two daughters of one of his sons.
He showed the older sister a pornographic video before he sexually violated her.
The man, who was then 68 years old, told the seven-year-old after the assault that she would not be his favourite grandchild if she told anyone what had happened.
That year, he also molested the younger sister, who was five then, while they were watching TV.
On Aug 4, 2023, the younger girl told her mother the man had touched her.
When the woman asked if this had happened to other children, the older girl disclosed what the man had done to her.
Their mother then lodged a police report.
One of the nieces had been sexually abused between 1994 and 1996 when she was aged between nine and 12 years old.
She went to the man’s home for tuition, and would stay over on Fridays to play with her cousins.
Once, when she cried, he gave her S$50 (US$39.21) and told her not to tell anyone what had happened.
She later came up with excuses not to go for tuition.
In 2012, one of her aunts confronted the man over what he had done to her daughter, who was another niece he had sexually abused. - The Straits Times/ANN
