NEW ORLEANS -- A New Orleans mechanic was sentenced today to 15 years in prison for forcing a 14-year-old girl to give him oral sex at knifepoint in 1991.
Gerard Ladmirault, 55, will now be a registered sex offender and must serve 15 years at hard labor. His victim, LaToya Gaines, now 41, gave a powerful victim impact statement in front of Judge Keva Landrum-Johnson on Tuesday, asking the judge to give Ladmirault the maximum 20 years allowable under 1991 guidelines that have since become far stricter.
“For 27 years you’ve managed to be Mr. Untouchable, free to be the animal and the devil that you are,” Gaines said from the witness stand, addressing Ladmirault sitting about 10 feet away at the defense table. “You sentenced me to 27 years to life, a life of trying to piece back my morale, my trust, my love, my understanding and my youthfulness.”
Gaines’ long journey to bring Ladmirault to justice was exposed in an exclusive WWL-TV investigation this summer. Gaines and another teen she did not know at the time, college student TaTanisha Smith, accused Ladmirault of raping them 60 days apart in 1991.
Smith’s case went to trial in 1992, but the jury acquitted Ladmirault based on his defense that he and Smith had engaged in consensual sex. Smith claimed she was walking alone at night, Ladmirault picked her up promising to protect her from a car that was following her, then brought her to his mechanic shop at gunpoint and forced her to have anal, vaginal and oral sex with him.
Gaines said that 60 days later, on Oct. 16, 1991, Ladmirault was courting the neighbor she and her brothers were staying with and offered to buy her school clothes. She said he drove past the clothing store, took her to his house and forced her to have oral sex with a pocket knife to her throat.
Her mother quickly had the charges against Ladmirault dropped, something Gaines said her now deceased mother said she was paid off to do. Later, as an adult, Gaines saw Ladmirault at casinos and confronted him, but didn’t revitalize the charges against him until she said she saw him dropping a teenage girl off at her son’s school. She immediately drove to the district attorney’s office to refile the charges.
Two trials ended in hung juries in 2015 and 2016. It looked as if the DA might drop the case this year, when WWL-TV did an extensive review of the case and the evidence. The DA’s office did push for a third trial and that looked like it might end in a hung jury too when the jury went into hours of deliberations Oct. 17.
Although aggravated oral sexual battery is now considered aggravated rape, it was not in 1991. So, Ladmirault was sentenced under the 1991 guidelines, which call for a maximum of 20 years in prison, and not the current guidelines, which would have called for life without parole.
Gaines asked Landrum-Johnson to give Ladmirault the maximum 20 years. During her poignant victim-impact statement Tuesday, Gaines recalled her memories of the attack.
“Do you know that memories wonderful as well as horrible are forever embedded in our brains?” Gaines said, again addressing Ladmirault directly. “We as humans may not remember every little detail, yet we remember the strong parts …. Gerard I am human. I was that little girl with the bright eyes and the promising future before you took it. I will never forget that night, the horrible painful memory of you suddenly appearing in the mirror behind me.”
After Landrum-Johnson sentenced Ladmirault to 15 years at hard labor and declared him a sex offender, Gaines was relieved.
“I would have liked for him to get the whole 20, because I've done far more than that. I've been sentenced to far more than that,” she said in an interview with WWL-TV. “I have to go with it, and with him now having to register once he's free as a sex offender, and for people to know to protect their kids and watch out for themselves, I'm willing to deal with that.”
Ladmirault’s attorney, David Belfield, said he would appeal the ruling and the sentence. He and the lead prosecutor on the case, Jason Napoli, later had a toe-to-toe confrontation in the hallway outside the courtroom. A sheriff’s deputy had to step between them and break it up.