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“You should always understand that you were the victim of a crime and you did nothing wrong,” Superior Court Judge Edward A. Jerejian told the boy, now 11, who sat in the front row as the judge sentenced 20-year-old Rigoberto Ramirez.
The pre-teen put on a brave face but was overcome with emotion, burying his head in his mother’s shoulder, as Assistant Bergen County Prosecutor Marybel Mercado Ramirez began outlining the history of the case.
Rigoberto Ramirez (STORY / PHOTOS: Mary K. Miraglia, CLIFFVIEW PILOT Courthouse Reporter)
At one point, the boy and his mother left the courtroom. They returned in time to see Jerejian sentence Ramirez.
A family member read a letter the boy’s mother composed, in which she talks of her son’s great inner strength.
“He said he knew he had to tell the truth so he could save other children,” she wrote.
However, she said, “he wondered if he would ever be a normal boy again.”
The woman said she has come to understand that someone who commits such a crime must have once suffered terribly himself. However, she said that doesn’t excuse anything.
Ramirez, she said, “single-handedly attempted to destroy my son’s childhood.”
“I was hoping I could say by now that we forgive him,” the letter says, “but I can’t.”
Under the terms of the No Early Release Act, Ramirez must serve six years and eight months before he is eligible for parole. He has five months of jail credit, which knocks the time down further.
However, the judge ordered that Ramirez serve the term at the Adult Diagnostic and Treatment Center at Avenel — which means that he can be committed indefinitely if experts find that he is a continuing risk.
Defense attorney Ron Bar-Nadav called the sentence a harsh penalty.
“What happened was extraordinarily terrible, I understand that,” he told the judge. “If he could compensate the victim, he would. I have just received a bill from the state for therapy, and we’ll gladly pay that.
“When this happened, my client was just 18 years old. He himself was a youth, judge.”
In turn, Mercado Ramirez, the assistant prosecutor, said, “I appreciate that Mr. Ramirez was a young man.” But, she said, “this was just a little boy, who happened to live [near] the defendant.
Assistant Bergen County Prosecutor Marybel Mercado Ramirez (STORY / PHOTOS: Mary K. Miraglia, CLIFFVIEW PILOT Courthouse Reporter)
“Why he picked this child, I don’t know,” she said.
Investigators who arrested Ramirez also seized hundreds of images of child pornography, the prosecutor told the judge.
“They’re revolting, your honor,” she said. “I didn’t bring them because I didn’t think you’d want to look at them.
“He said he thought it had to do with his being gay. But there are thousands of gay people who never have sex with children.”
Although Ramirez pleaded guilty to one count of aggravated sexual assault, a first-degree crime, he was sentenced in the second-degree range. He will have to serve five years of supervised parole, remain under Megan’s Law supervision for life and never again have contact with the victim or his family, under the sentence.
“It’s the maximum I can give you under the plea agreement,” the judge told Ramirez.
Ramirez, in turn, told him: “What I did was very wrong, and I apologize for that. I’m willing to go to the diagnostic center, and I hope to get better.”
The judge wasn’t buying it, however. He said Ramirez lacked remorse, particularly in his submissions to the court, which Jerejian said were all about him.
“You say you regret your actions,” the judge said, “but everything you do is aimed at reducing the consequences to yourself.”
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