FARMINGTON — A Farmington man was sentenced Friday to serve five years in prison for sexually assaulting a woman after offering to fix a lock on her apartment door last summer.
Jonathan Dumont, 29, who received a 10-year sentence with half of it suspended, will serve four years of probation after he is released from prison. He also must register as a sex offender for life.
He pleaded guilty Feb. 5 in Franklin County Superior Court to a Class A charge of gross sexual assault, which is punishable by up to 30 years in prison and a $50,000 fine. Two other sexual assault charges were dismissed in the plea agreement.
Assistant District Attorney Claire Andrews said earlier this month that if the case had gone to trial, the court would have heard that Dumont went to the apartment with another man to help move an item on June 29, 2014. While there, the victim said she needed help with her door and Dumont, whom she did not know, told her he had the tools and would be back to fix it. He returned a few hours later and sexually assaulted the woman while a young relative was outside walking a dog.
The family member would have testified that she returned to the apartment and could hear the woman crying and repeatedly saying, “No.” The family member went to a room and saw Dumont committing a sex act.
On Friday, the victim’s husband read a statement from his wife, who was not in the courtroom. She described the assault as the “single most harrowing and excruciating experience” of her life.
“All that I could think whilst this most horrific of ordeals was taking place was how frightened I was that my (young family member) would return from taking our dog in the front yard and suffer a similar fate herself,” her husband read.
“I foolishly thought the torture was at an end when I scrambled back on my feet and into the back room. I was wrong. I was pursued and another assault took place which only ended when (her relative) managed to break her way back into the house through the original locked door, which this individual was supposedly here to fix. How ironic life can be,” her husband read.
Since then, she wrote, she has questioned whether she could have done something, anything, to prevent what occurred, whether she was able to fully protect her family member, whether there is any point continuing on in life if “I am worth so little for something like this to happen to me.”
Yet she managed to gain perspective and push past all the heartache and lack of self-worth.
“This was not my fault,” her husband read from her letter. “This could not have been prevented. There was only one person responsible for this savage and avoidable attack and that person is being sentenced to incarceration today.”
The sentencing, she wrote, is providing her and family members adequate closure and they feel slightly safer as a result.
“It is still a daily struggle to leave the house, but as this rape showed, I am not even safe in my own home,” her husband read. “So I must remain vigilant at all times and trust sparingly for the time being. I have hope. I will not give up.”
Addressing Dumont in her letter, her husband read, “I hope you spend the following years of your life reflecting, not on what you did to me that day, but instead upon when you emerge from prison and attempt to pursue education, a career and/or potential love interest — because each and every time you choose to pursue such things, your name will forever remain on the sex offender register and will be waiting for everyone to discover and reflect upon accordingly — just as everyone present in this courtroom is doing right now.”
dperry@sunmediagroup.net
Send questions/comments to the editors.
