Ex-Cheerleader Gets 6 Months in Dad’s Death

A judge today sentenced a tearful 18-year-old former cheerleader to six months in jail for hiring a classmate to kill her father, who she said had sexually abused her for years.

Cheryl Pierson fainted on hearing Suffolk County Court Judge Harvey Sherman’s decision. It took several minutes to revive her and she was escorted sobbing from the courtroom and taken directly to jail.

Pierson was convicted earlier this summer of paying a classmate $400 to kill her father, James Pierson, 42, allegedly to end years of sexual abuse.

The teen-age hit man, Sean Pica, who was 16 when he pulled the trigger, is serving eight to 24 years in prison for the slaying.

Pierson’s boyfriend, Robert Cuccio Jr., who delivered the payoff money after the killing outside Pierson’s Selden, N.Y., home on Feb. 5, 1986, is to be sentenced Thursday.

Faced 6-Year Term

In his sentence, Sherman said he had granted Pierson youthful offender treatment. As an adult she faced a maximum prison term of six years.

Sherman said he had received “hundreds of letters,” many of them from victims of sexual abuse and incest, requesting clemency for her.

Sherman also placed her on five years’ probation under “close supervision.”

During the eight days of pre-sentence hearings, testimony from 23 witnesses painted the tragic life of a teen-ager whose father forced her to have sex with him up to three times a day as her mother lay dying.

Pierson testified that she lied to detectives about her father’s killing because she did not want anyone to know he had sexually abused her.

“I was ashamed and embarrassed,” she said during the hearing. “I thought if I didn’t get caught, no one would know about the sexual abuse.”