A 26-year-old apprentice plumber from Spring Branch has been sentenced to 25 years in prison for molesting a 4-year-old girl in the living room of her home while his boss and the girl’s parents were looking at an upstairs bathroom, Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg announced Thursday.
“It’s every parent’s worst nightmare to have a stranger violate the sanctity of a family’s home and abuse a small child, and I’m proud we were able to get justice for this little girl,” Ogg said.
Brandon Joseph Bonds, 26, pleaded guilty on Monday to Aggravated Sexual Assault of a Child, a first-degree felony, instead of facing a jury in a trial for the incident on Aug. 25, 2018. The plea spares the girl from having to take the stand at trial.
Bonds and his boss, a master plumber, were working on a garage apartment at the victim’s family’s home and the young girl was watching television in the living room. The girl’s father asked the master plumber to come check on an upstairs bathroom and locked the back door, leaving Bonds outside. Bonds was able to get the girl to unlock the door to let him in and then proceeded to molest her. He then went upstairs where the girl’s father asked him how he got in. After the plumbers left, the child told her parents what happened.
The girl was taken to Texas Children’s Hospital where she was examined by a sexual assault nurse examiner, who collected evidence and interviewed the girl.
The evidence against Bonds included DNA from the victim’s body and forensic evidence from his phone that showed that he recorded the incident on video. That video was deleted, but investigators with the District Attorney’s Digital Forensic Investigations Unit were able to recover evidence that it existed, according to Assistant District Attorney Preston Burns, who prosecuted the case.
“Of all the child abuse cases I’ve seen, this is one of the worst because that 4-year-old was watching cartoons in her living room, with her parents at home, and it should have been the safest place in the universe for her,” Burns said. “But he was able to get to her and do something terribly, horribly awful to her.”
