An East Bay man who was convicted in March in a case involving the years-long sexual abuse of his stepdaughter was sentenced Friday to 116 years to life in state prison. As Bay City News reports, 41-year-old Armando Morales-Cuevas was convicted of four counts of intercourse with a child age 10 or younger and one count of continuous sexual abuse of a child age 14 or younger, for abuse that began when the girl was eight years old.
The girl, who is now 14, gave statements to child abuse investigators in 2015 and later to prosecutors implicating Morales-Cuevas in a pattern of sexual abuse that went on over four years. She was removed from her mother's custody and put in foster care, and later recanted her accusations against her stepfather, but jurors convicted him anyway based on her earlier statements. Also, Morales-Cuevas had admitted to prosecutors to having some sexual contact with the girl.
Morales-Cuevas, who worked as a chef in a Berkeley restaurant, had been married to the girl's mother since 2007, and the abuse began four years later. Morales-Cuevas was the only father the girl had known, and reportedly she referred to him as "Dad."
He was accused of molesting the girl when she was 8 and 9-years-old, and accused of orally copulating with and sodomizing her when she was 11 and 12.