By: Patti Weaver
(Stillwater, Okla.) — A 56-year-old Stillwater man avoided a jury trial this week by pleading guilty last week to repeatedly sexually abusing a 4-year-old boy, for which he was given a 15-year prison term followed by 15 years of probation, court records show.
James Leroy Bear could have been given as much as life in prison without the possibility of parole if a jury had found him guilty of child sexual abuse after four prior convictions for lewd molestation in Creek and Payne counties, court records show.
In accepting Bear’s guilty plea five days before he was scheduled to face a jury, Associate District Judge Stephen Kistler told Bear that he would receive no credit for the nearly two years he has been held in the Payne County Jail on $125,000 bail while awaiting a trial.
Bear was arrested by Payne County Sheriff’s Investigator Rockford Brown about 4 pm on Aug. 30, 2019, in Bear’s vehicle, which “had a garden hose leading from the tailpipe into the cab of the vehicle via the window,” an affidavit said.
“I observed Bear, who appeared to be deceased or sleeping, sitting in the driver seat with the motor running. I gave commands for Bear to show me his hands; Bear complied and he was taken into custody,” the sheriff’s investigator wrote in his affidavit.
The previous day, the sheriff’s investigator had observed a forensic interview of the 4-year-old boy, according to his affidavit.
Bear was a family friend to the boy and “had unfettered access to the child,” the affidavit said.
The boy disclosed that he and Bear “slept in the same bed at times and neither wore underwear,” the affidavit said.
“Bear had touched (his) genitalia with his hand and performed oral sex,” on the 4-year-old boy, the affidavit said.
When the boy was seen on Aug. 30, 2019, by a nurse practitioner at the Saville Center in Stillwater, during the medical exam the boy further disclosed being anally raped by Bear that caused the boy to bleed, the affidavit said.
According to court records and the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, Bear had previously been convicted of:
* lewd or indecent proposals/acts to a child and forcible sodomy in 1997 in Creek County where a jury found him guilty in 1998, for which he was given a total of 17 years in prison that he began serving in 2001 and completed in 2007;
* lewd molestation and forcible sodomy in separate cases in 1997 in Creek County, to which he pleaded no contest in 1998 and received two concurrent 15-year prison terms that he began serving in 2007 and discharged in 2013;
* lewd or indecent proposals/acts to a child in 1997 in Payne County, to which he pleaded no contest in 1998 and received a five-year prison term of which he served two years.
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