Man Gets 457 Years for Kidnapping, Rape

A homeless Oxnard man may have received the longest sentence ever handed down in Ventura County for kidnapping two teenage sisters at knifepoint in 1996, tying them up with apron strings, then sexually assaulting one.

Ventura Superior Court Judge Donald Coleman sentenced Ernest Harold, 40, to 457 years to life Wednesday for the crime.

After a 10-day trial, a jury convicted Harold of 14 counts, including kidnapping for sexual purposes, forced oral copulation and sexual battery. Each count also carried the special circumstance of using a knife in the act of a crime.

Harold’s two prior robbery convictions propelled his sentence into centuries under the “three strikes” law. One prior conviction was in July 1980, the other in May 1990, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Mickye Coyle.

“You couldn’t get a sentence this high before the three-strikes law came out,” Coyle said. “It’s meaningless in terms of his ability to serve it. But it’s not meaningless in that it says how we feel about people who do these things.”

According to the prosecution’s version of events:

On Dec. 9, 1996, Harold picked up the sisters, ages 16 and 19, from a parking lot of the business where they worked on Saviers Road in Oxnard. He held one of them at knifepoint and drove them to Mugu Rock.

There he bound them with apron strings ripped from their uniforms.

After the attack on the younger girl, Harold climbed back into his car with the girls and lit a cigarette. At that point, police arrived on a routine check.

As they stood at the doors, the older sister mouthed to one officer, “Don’t go.”

Coyle said that before Harold’s sentence, she doesn’t recall any longer than 197 years.

“He earned every day,” Coyle said of Harold’s sentence. “Too bad he can’t be forced to stay alive to live the sentence.”