Categories: News, Schenectady County

Steven D. Walker, the man who pleaded guilty to pulling three teeth from a developmentally disabled 8-year-old in 2013, was sentenced Wednesday to four years in prison, the maximum sentence for the crime.

The 35-year-old Gallupville man pleaded guilty to second-degree assault, a class D felony, in June after being arrested Nov. 21, 2013. Police said he pulled three mature teeth from the young girl’s mouth with pliers while she was in his care.

Schoharie County District Attorney James Sackett said he thought justice had been served, though he would have liked a longer sentence.

“It’s horrible,” he said of the crime. “It’s absolutely horrible. It couldn’t be any worse.”

The case was opened in fall 2013 after the girl complained of mouth pain at school. She was examined by her regular dentist, who noticed three of her permanent teeth had been forcibly removed. The police began an investigation, and Walker was arrested not long after.

In court before sentencing, Walker asked for leniency, claiming his absence would be hard on his wife and three children. He also expressed regret for pleading guilty last summer. At the time, he entered an Alford Plea, which allows a person to plead guilty without admitting to the crime.

“At the time, I thought I was protecting my family,” Walker said in court Wednesday, “and it was the biggest mistake of my life.”

Walker’s attorney, Ryan McAllister, said in court that Walker “has consistently maintained that he does not know what happened to the victim” and that Walker had willingly entered into parenting and mental health counseling over the past year.

McAllister declined to comment on the sentence.

Sackett called Walker’s initial confession of guilt “half-hearted” and said Walker had suggested at the time he was covering for another individual. Nevertheless, Sackett said he felt Walker was guilty and deserving of the sentence.

“I do believe that he was the perpetrator,” said Sackett. “Whether he was the sole perpetrator, I’m not sure.”

He said the evidence against Walker was mostly circumstantial, like the fact that Walker’s size and strength would have made him capable of pulling the girl’s teeth — an act Sackett called “basically torture.”

Sackett said the girl, Walker’s niece, had been put in Walker’s custody because her parents, also developmentally disabled, could not care for her. According to Sackett, Walker’s three children have also been removed from the home since his arrest.

Sackett said investigators had hoped more evidence would come forward after the guilty plea, but were left with “as many questions as there are answers,” including why Walker forcibly removed the girl’s teeth.

“We were never able to determine why the teeth had been pulled,” he said. “Frankly speaking, this is one of the most exasperating cases I’ve had in my 18 years as a district attorney.”

The girl, now 9, has minimal verbal skills, which Sackett said made the investigation particularly challenging — “truly a victim who could not defend herself,” he said.

In addition to four years in prison, Walker was sentenced to three years of post-sentence supervision and an eight-year order of protection was issued on behalf of the girl and her family.

The girl was placed in foster care with a family she knew immediately after the crime, and Sackett said she has had dental attention since, but reconstructive surgery will have to wait until the rest of her teeth mature.