VICTORVILLE >> A Victorville man faces more than 360 years in state prison for sexually abusing his young stepdaughter for years.
A jury found him guilty Monday on 29 counts of sexually abusing a child and possessing child pornography.
“This is one of the most disturbing and devastating cases I have been involved with,” said Deputy District Attorney Kathlene DiDonato who prosecuted the case.
Luis Gilbert Sanchez, 32, was convicted of not only sexually abusing the now 15-year-old girl, but also took videos and photos of the attacks, she said. Sanchez was in Victorville Superior Court when the jury came to its decision Monday, court records show, and he could be sentenced to a total of 366 years and 8 months to life in state prison on Sept. 22.
Court documents show that 27 of the 29 charges were for sexual abuse of a child. The last two charges were for child pornography.
Sanchez began sexually molesting the girl when she was only 6, according to the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office and sheriff’s investigators. It continued until the girl was 8, when Sanchez was arrested in 2009.
Sanchez’s wife called San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputies in late February 2009 after she came home early from work one day and found Sanchez and her daughter behaving strangely.
When the woman asked her daughter privately if anything was wrong, the girl confessed that Sanchez had been molesting her for years.
Following an investigation with the help of the Department of Children and Family Services, Sanchez was arrested March 10, 2009.
The girl took the stand last week to give her account of the abuse.
“She was just one day shy of her 14th birthday when she testified,” DiDonato said. “She is just a really, really bright girl who doesn’t let this define who she is. She is very resilient.”