Tacoma man charged with beating girlfriend for 14 hours sentenced to decades in prison
A Tacoma man accused of beating his girlfriend for 14 hours has been sentenced to 25 years in prison.
Superior Court Judge Garold Johnson gave 27-year-old Jermaine Gore Jr. the sentence Thursday.
Gore faced the possibility of life without parole under the state’s “three strikes” law if he’d been convicted of first-degree assault or first-degree kidnapping as he was originally charged.
Instead, Gore agreed to an exceptional sentence of 25 years and pleaded guilty to third-degree assault, unlawful imprisonment, witness tampering and first-degree criminal mistreatment with an aggravating factor of deliberate cruelty. As part of the agreement he also pleaded guilty to another count of third-degree assault in a separate case.
“This resolution takes into account the vicious and brutal nature of the assault, as well as the length of time over which it took place, and the residual effects on the victim,” prosecutors wrote the court.
Charging papers gave this account of what happened, according to News Tribune archives:
Gore beat his 19-year-old girlfriend with a cord, choked her until she passed out and destroyed her phone after he became upset about an old picture on her social media account.
He assaulted her for 14 hours, then let her call an ambulance.
She had broken ribs, broken vertebrae, a broken eye socket, broken finger and kidney failure when she was found dehydrated and covered in bruises and cuts in a parking lot Jan. 29, 2019.
She said she had been robbed. Later she told doctors her boyfriend beat her.
Gore was on the run for several weeks before he was arrested at a Lakewood apartment by the FBI South Sound Gang Task Force, state Department of Corrections and Tacoma police.
His criminal history includes two convictions of second-degree assault, which is a strike offense.
