Crime & Safety
Mother Sentenced for Raping Bel Air Boy
The woman has been ordered to register as a sex offender for the rest of her life.
The 37-year-old who pleaded guilty to second-degree rape of a Bel Air boy has been sentenced to 12 years in prison.
, a mother of three from Lake Forest in Orange County, was sentenced Wednesday by Judge William O. Carr of the . She will serve her sentence in the Maryland Division of Correction.
She was sentenced to 20 years, eight of which were suspended by Carr. She pleaded guilty to the charge June 2.
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Upon release, Hicks has been ordered to serve five years of supervised probation. She is prohibited from contacting the boy, who was 13 at the time, and his family and is not permitted to have unsupervised contact with anyone younger than 18. She was also ordered to undergo sexual offender treatment and register as a sex offender for the rest of her life.
Hicks was arrested at her home Jan. 7 by Orange County, CA, police after admitting to having sex with a 13-year-old Bel Air boy, whom she met playing Xbox Live.
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Police said Hicks drove to Florida from California on Thanksgiving weekend to visit family and stopped in Maryland on the way home. During her visit to Bel Air she had sex with the boy at his home while his parents were sleeping in the house.
“We have an obligation to protect our boys from on-line solicitation and on-line predators in the same way we protect our girls,” Diane Adkins Tobin, the prosecuting attorney for the case, said in a statement.
The case was investigated by Trooper Michelle Workman of the Maryland State Police, the , assisted by the Orange County California Sheriff’s Office, the FBI, and the U.S. Marshall’s Service, the release stated.
