UPDATED: Agar sentenced to 38 years for child sexual assault
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ALPENA -- Todd Agar will spend 38 years or more in prison for sexually assaulting a child, Judge Jason Elmore said in Alpena's 26th Circuit Court on Wednesday.
Elmore in September found Agar, 52, guilty of raping the girl, now a woman, when she was about 11 years old.
Several other women also testified at Agar's bench trial that Agar sexually assaulted them when they were about 14 years old, in about 2005.
The News does not identify survivors of sexual assault without their consent.
Though saying he believed the women, Elmore had to declare Agar not guilty related to those alleged assaults because of statute of limitation rules for sexual crimes.
At Wednesday's sentencing, Elmore sentenced Agar to 38 to 75 years in prison for the assault for which he found Agar guilty.
The woman whose testimony led to the guilty charge said in a survivor impact statement that Agar should spend the rest of his life in prison.
"He will never be rehabilitated," she told the judge. "He will always be a predator, looking for the next child victim."
According to her testimony, Agar sexually abused her for about five years, starting when she was 6.
In preparing for the sentencing hearing, she tried to write down the ways in which Agar's abuse left a lingering trail of trauma in her life.
"It was 32 pages, front and back," the survivor said. "That doesn't even come close to describing what this man did to me."
In the years after his abuse, as the woman struggled to cope with the trauma of childhood sexual assault, Agar tried to intimidate her into not telling anyone what he did to her, she said.
"I want him to know that every futile attempt made me stronger," she said. "It made my voice louder."
Alpena County Prosecutor Cynthia Muszynski urged Elmore to sentence Agar to the high end of the sentencing guidelines, remembering as he did so that Agar allegedly had assaulted other minors, even if he could not be convicted for those assaults.
Agar spoke before his sentence was imposed, accusing his victim of lying and proclaiming his innocence.
Elmore, of Wexford and Missaukee counties -- who presided over the trial because of a conflict of interest on the part of Judge Ed Black, of Alpena -- said he would consider neither the testimony of other witnesses or extraneous evidence in imposing sentence.
"It's only about her," Elmore said, looking at the survivor. "This is entirely about a young girl who was sexually assaulted at a very young age."
Saying his sentence "may not be palatable to the defendant," Elmore sentenced Agar to spend at least 456 months -- or 38 years --- in prison, with a maximum sentence of 75 years.