GRAND HAVEN (WHTC-AM/FM) — Before being sent off to prison, 46-year-old Kevin Richard Stuhan of Nunica acknowledged that three years of raping and verbally abusing a young teen — from the time she was 13 until she was 16 “was a major lack of judgment.”
While he apologized to his victim and her family, calling his crime “a one-time thing,” according to a Grand Haven Tribune report, that didn’t convince Ottawa County Circuit Court Judge Jon Hulsing.
Hulsing gave Stuhan a longer sentence than recommended — more-than six to 15 years in prison — for third-degree criminal sexual conduct.
Stuhan gets credit for 157 days already served in jail. He’ll register as a sex offender when he is released from prison.
The mother of his victim, in a statement to the court read by a friend, called Stuhan “a pedophile and sexual predator who selected a vulnerable family from the herd and manipulated his way into our lives in order to have access to my young daughter. He not only groomed her, he groomed our family.”
In the process, he destroyed all of their lives, she said after the court hearing.
Hitsman’s daughter was 13 when Stuhan entered her life and in her statement to the court, read by a friend, she said, “For three years of my life, the worst possible thing anyone could have gone through happened to me,” adding that she still suffers many negative effects of the abuse.
