In exchange for a seven-year sentence, a 34-year-old Little Rock man admitted Thursday in Pulaski County Circuit Court to molesting a 13-year-old girl.
The admission comes just two months after a jury rejected a 19-year-old woman's accusations that Ambrose Bernard Williams had raped her when she was a child.
The woman and the girl were the children of former girlfriends, and each testified against Williams at his December trial, along with a 7-year-old girl who also told jurors Williams had sexually abused her, although he was never charged. He was acquitted after a one-day jury trial on Dec. 7.
Williams, who has also lived in North Little Rock and Sherwood, had been charged with rape based on the 13-year-old North Little Rock girl's accusations about how he had groped her in November 2016, after engaging in some horseplay with her and her younger brother at the family home while Williams was there for dinner.
She said her brother and mother were in another room when he molested her. Her mother had been dating Williams for a few months at the time, and the girl said she considered him a close friend. She called 911 from a neighbor's house that same night.
Williams was arrested about two weeks later based on her accusations. In exchange for his guilty plea to sexual indecency with a child, which required him to admit he had "sexual contact" with the eighth-grader, prosecutors dropped the rape charge, which carried a possible life sentence.
The indecency charge is a Class D felony that carries a maximum 15 years in prison for a repeat offender like Williams. The plea agreement negotiated by his attorney, Leslie Borgognoni, calls for Williams, who has convictions for firearm possession, domestic battering, theft, commercial burglary and robbery, to serve seven years in prison followed by an eight-year suspended sentence. He also will have to register as a sex offender.
The 19-year-old was the first accuser against Williams. She was taken to police in August 2011, telling detectives that in November 2010, when Williams was her mother's boyfriend, he had sodomized her while ordering her to call him "master," according to testimony. Charges were not filed against him in that case until after the older girl went to police.
Williams was never charged over the claims of the 7-year-old girl that he had abused her in April 2015 while she was watching TV at her mother's Jacksonville home.
Testifying in a pretrial proceeding last year, the second-grader said that when she told her mother, the woman did not believe her and made her apologize to Williams. She also was diagnosed with the sexually transmitted disease chlamydia then, but Williams did not have the disease. The girl now lives with her father.
Metro on 02/16/2018