A former soldier previously stationed at Joint Base Lewis-McChord was sentenced Friday in U.S. District Court to 25 years in prison for sexually abusing four children between ages 3 and 11 and threatening them so they would keep quiet.
Jonathan Gentry, 36, pleaded guilty in July to three counts of abusive sexual contact with a minor and one count of sexual abuse of a minor for acts that occurred from 2010 to 2014. He was indicted in December.
Prosecutors said Gentry was previously arrested by military police in 2013 for sexually touching a 13-year-old girl and her friend. Gentry was court-martialed and sentenced to two years in military prison. Years later, four other children who were left in his care came forward about what prosecutors called “horrific sexual abuse.”
“The victims were helpless children,” Judge David G. Estudillo said at Gentry’s sentencing hearing in Tacoma. “You were the monster that was living with them. You scarred these victims for the rest of their lives.”
One victim who prosecutors said was repeatedly raped by Gentry when they were between 5 and 9 years old estimated that the abuse took place almost daily until they graduated kindergarten. Two other victims reported that Gentry threatened to harm or kill their families if they didn’t do what he said.
Gentry’s appointed defense attorney, Lance Hester, requested that his client receive no further period of incarceration while remaining on a lengthy term of supervised release. The attorney wrote in a sentencing memorandum that such a sentence would recognize Gentry’s insistence that the victims avoid the rigors of participating in a trial and the “extreme lapse in time” from when the conduct occurred to when his accusers made their reports.
In a letter to the judge, Gentry said he accepted full responsibility for the actions he was accused of and said that since his previous incarceration he has worked to build a new life. He said the last 10 years had shown that he was not a danger to the community or the victims.
“I also accept responsibility for becoming part of their lives without being able to live up to the responsibilities of a young adult,” Gentry wrote. “I failed to provide the safe space those children needed to grow, learn, and become healthy members of society. Instead, by my choices, I led them onto a more difficult path.”
Hester said Gentry joined the Army after he was married, and he and his wife had a daughter in 2010. Gentry was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, where Hester said Gentry was exposed to dangerous and stressful conditions. When he returned to his home on JBLM, the attorney said, Gentry found that his wife had let the house become filthy, and Child Protective Services contacted her over the conditions and their children’s well-being.
Gentry and his wife began drinking heavily, according to Hester, which frequently resulted in Gentry blacking out. He was also depressed and suicidal, and when Gentry was accused of molesting a girl in 2013, Hester said, Gentry didn’t fight the accusations because he knew he had frequent blackouts and he didn’t want to put his family through trauma.
Prosecutors said neither the difficulties Gentry experienced in childhood nor his time out of custody without new criminal charges could excuse the suffering he inflicted on his victims. They said the delay in catching him doesn’t undermine the damage he caused or take away the fact he is a “prolific child pedophile with at least six known victims.”
“Defense will likely argue for a lower sentence because Gentry has been in the community allegedly “crime free,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memorandum. “But the truth is, we have no idea whether Gentry has other victims considering he successfully scared at least these four victims into silence for over ten years.”
In one 2013 incident, court records described Gentry providing alcohol to a girl and one of the victims. After they went to bed, Gentry carried the victim from the bedroom to the living room, where he forced alcohol down her throat, sexually assaulted the victim and stopped them from trying to crawl away from him to continue molesting them.
Prosecutors said the sexual abuse had a profound and lasting effect on the victims. One reportedly described deep anxiety, difficulty trusting people and ongoing night terrors.