Mom financed drug addiction by letting dealer rape her child

INQUIRER.net PHOTO

“I can honestly say that, in three-and-a-half years on the bench, this is by far the worst thing that has come before this court.”

These were the exact words of Ohio’s Hamilton County Pleas Court judge, Leslie Ghiz, after sentencing April Corcoran to 51 years  in prison on Tuesday (Wednesday in Manila).

The 32-year-old defendant was guilty of loaning her 11-year-old daughter to her drug dealer, in order to raise money to feed her heroin addiction, a Washington Report said.

With her mother’s consent, the teenager was raped, sodomized and abused multiple times by the drug supplier, who sometimes even videotaped the whole ordeal.

Corcoran pleaded guilty to multiple counts of complicity to rape, human trafficking and child endangerment, after admitting she forced her daughter to perform sexual acts with a 40-year-old man.

“You showed no kind of mercy,” the judge told Corcoran. ”I don’t know that you grasp the damage that has been done to this poor child.”

The alleged dealer, Shandell Willingham, preferred children younger than 11, and prosecutors added that Corcoran dressed her daughter up to make her look even younger.

“I guess, her drug dealer had a propensity to film little kids when they are performing sexual acts on him,” Assistant Hamilton County Prosecutor Katie Pridemore said at the time of the plea.

“She didn’t have the means or the cash to buy her heroin anymore so she offered up her child in return,” she added.

Willingham, meanwhile, was also charged and is currently awaiting his hearing.

Apart from allowing her daughter be defiled,  Corcoran had another special routine after her daughter was brutalized.  As a “reward,” she gave her daughter heroin, the court was told.

“Sometimes this defendant would give a little bit of heroin to her daughter,” Pridemore told the court. “The daughter didn’t want it but she said, ‘you’re a good girl. You did the right thing.’”

Despite the grim circumstances, the judge noticed that Corcoran has not expressed any apologies to her daughter while inside the court.

“As a parent, it is hard to imagine how you could use your child to satisfy your drug addiction,” Ghiz said. “Even after all my years as a prosecutor, I continue to be amazed at how badly parents treat their children”.

James Borgen, Corcoran’s court-appointed attorney, meanwhile, expressed his sympathies to everyone involved.

“They tell me before she [Corcoran] became hooked on heroin that she was a very loving and attentive parent,” he said. Khristian Ibarrola