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Aldred Redick, 40, has 457 days of jail credit that will be applied to his eight-year sentence. He’ll be eligible for parole sometime next summer.
That didn’t please Presiding Superior Court Judge Liliana DeAvila-Silebi.
“What bothers me is that he threatened and demeaned the child after the assault to keep him from reporting the crime,” she said.
An indictment returned by a grand jury in Hackensack said Redick told the boy: “Don’t cross me. [T]his is between you and me.”
“I will honor the plea agreement,” the judge said today. “It was arrived at so the child wouldn’t have to testify.”
Aldred Redick, (STORY / PHOTOS: CLIFFVIEW PILOT Courthouse Reporter Mary K. Miraglia)
Redick apologized.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” he told family members, asking them to “find it in your hearts to forgive me.”
“This is not my character — I don’t even know why I did this,” Redick said. “This was never something I thought could happen….God is forgiving. He forgives me for my sins, and I hope you will, too.”
The boy’s father, a pastor, brought him to tears again.
“We are human beings,” the pastor said. “I accepted my role in life to help those who need it. I don’t regret it.
“Eight years, five years, means nothing,” he said. “As far as forgiving, that is easy for me. I teach that, I preach that. My wife and I, that is what we do.
“But the Bible also says you reap what you sow,” the pastor told Redick. “So you have to take the responsibility for what you did.”
Of Redick, he said; “I don’t know if he is really remorseful, or just sorry. I think he is sorry. I pray that he gets his life together, but he is going to have to do it without me.”
The victim remained composed, his mother’s arm around his shoulder most of the time.
Defense attorney Jeannine L. Melly sought a five-year sentence, saying it was “a very, very bad time” for her client when he sexually assaulted the 14-year old boy.
“He was drinking heavily,” Melly said. “He has done much since then to turn his life around.”
Assistant Bergen County Prosecutor Kristin DeMarco countered that there wouldn’t have been a plea without eight years.
She and former public defender Francis Meehan “took great pains to settle the case,” DeMarco said. “We were completely ready for trial, and in the midst of these negotiations the defendant was writing letters to the victim’s father admitting his actions.”
Redick faced a much harsher sentence if he’d been convicted in a trial, she added.
Experts didn’t find him to be a repetitive and compulsive offender, DeMarco noted.
Rather, she said, “it seems to be an act of an individual with anti-social behavior who committed the crime facilitated by the use of alcohol.
“He has a history of substance abuse back to his teenage years, and all his prior crimes seem to be substance related — forgery, trespass, burglary,” DeMarco said.
Redick’s committed the “ultimate betrayal” of trust and goodness to a family that was good to him, she said. He was doing chores around the house, she said, when he “took the child upstairs, forced his head into his lap and made him perform oral sex.”
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