A Guatemalan man has been jailed for life for raping and impregnating a 10-year-old girl.
Rony Otoniel Mendez was jailed without parole in Tampa, Florida, for repeatedly attacking the girl in her mother’s bedroom between 2013 and 2014.
The abuse began when she was just nine and was revealed when doctors discovered she was pregnant during a visit to hospital.
A DNA test later proved Mendez was the baby’s father.
The 26-year-old was extradited back to the US last year after fleeing to his native Guatemala when he suspected he would be arrested.
He was convicted of three sexual battery charges and one charge of lewd and lascivious molestation of a child under 12 in Tampa and given three life sentences without the possibility of parole.
Mendez was 23 when he first abused the girl, who was nine at the time, by fondling her breasts through her clothes in 2013.
On three separate occasions the following year, he raped her in her mother’s bedroom while she was at work.
