A serial sex offender has received an eight-year sentence for molesting a toddler, while out on conditional release from prison for molesting an 11-year-old girl.
Appearing before the Grand Court, via video link from Northward Prison, on Thursday, 17 Feb., Tony O’Connell Ebanks listened in silence as Justice Phillip St. John-Stevens sentenced him to eight years in prison for a single charge of indecent assault on a female.
The charge stems from an incident in April 2021, when Ebanks assaulted the child by using his finger to penetrate her.
“She was just 5 years old, when she was at her aunt’s house playing with a puzzle book on the bed when you [molested her],” said St. John-Stevens. “She screamed and told her aunt you were no longer her friend because you had hurt her.”
During sentencing, St. John-Stevens said Ebanks’s criminal history meant the community needed to be protected from him.
A serial offender
Ebanks was first convicted of a sexual offence in February 2009, for raping a woman. He was sentenced to three years in prison.
Then in February 2016, he molested an 11-year-old girl in the back of his car. It was revealed that he tricked the child, who was known to him, into thinking there was an emergency, which required her attention, and he was going to take her to the location. Instead, he drove to a secluded area, stripped off her clothes by force and molested her. He would go on to promise her a phone in exchange for not telling anyone.
For that crime, he was convicted of gross indecency in 2017 and jailed for an unstated period of time. While in prison he completed a sexual harm prevention programme and was conditionally released on 23 Oct. 2018.
Three years later he molested the toddler.
Protecting the community
“That 5-year-old child was in a place that was, for all intents and purposes, a safe place where she was able to play, and be a child. Instead you deliberately assaulted her,” St. John-Stevens said. “There is no doubt that children, and indeed the wider community, need to be protected from you.
“A clear message must be sent that children will be protected in these islands.”
The judge began with a sentence of four years, but eventually doubled it because of Ebanks’s criminal history and other aggravating factors.
In addition to the eight-year sentence, a 12-year sexual harm prevention order has been imposed on Ebanks, which will require that upon his release he has no access to or contact with children unless under very specific circumstances.
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