BRISTOL, Va. – Virginia Ramos should have taken the six-month plea deal originally offered by prosecutors on the abuse and neglect charge.
Instead, the woman who pleaded guilty in January to tying up her 6-year-old niece in July for sneaking food from the kitchen tried to garner sympathy from the sentencing judge Wednesday by blaming her two co-defendants.
It didn’t work.
Ramos received a three-year prison stay – triple the one-year agreement brokered by the girl’s grandmother, and six times more than the half-year deal the uncle finished serving last month.
Bristol Circuit Judge Larry B. Kirksey appeared irked that Ramos, 20, sought sympathy by blaming the others as the architects of the abuse.
All the court sees “is finger-pointing, but no regret or contrition,” Kirksey said moments before announcing a penalty well above the state’s sentencing guidelines of six months.
In August, Bristol police and social service workers swarmed a Springdale Village Apartments unit after receiving a cell phone snapshot of a shirtless little girl tied at the wrists and sitting on a bare bed.
The girl, with her mother and father incarcerated, lived with her aunt, Ramos, grandmother, Elsie Reyes, 46, and uncle, Roberto Leiva, 23.
Ramos and Reyes both pleaded guilty in January to abuse and neglect, while Leiva pleaded guilty to being an accessory before the fact to the abuse.
Immediately after the raid, Ramos confessed to tying the girl and frightening her with plastic snakes and spiders, Bristol Police Sgt. Steven Crawford testified Wednesday. It was punishment for eating too much cereal and stealing Honey Buns breakfast pastries from the grandmother’s bedroom, Crawford said.
He read from Ramos’ written confession detailing one punishment session: “I actually tied her legs together for a week without taking it off. She had to hop around ... to go to the bathroom.”
In her confession, Ramos said that Leiva tied the girl, too.
Shifting the blame Wednesday, defense attorney David Eddy argued that Ramos is mentally challenged and spent her high school years in special education classes. This means that she is the type of person who follows orders, not gives them, Eddy said.
“Within the family unit here, she was not the one in charge ... she was under the shadow of both her brother and her mother,” Eddy said.
Bristol Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Kimberly Mumpower noted having direct evidence against only Ramos, however.
After the hearing, Mumpower declined to discuss the initial plea offer made to Ramos.
Ramos, who faced a maximum sentence of five years, was offered a plea deal that suspended all but 12 months of that sentence, Eddy told the Bristol Herald Courier in an earlier interview.
Reyes took a similar deal.
Leiva is listed by the city jail as having finished his sentence in January.
mowens@bristolnews.com | (276) 645-2549
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