CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A Ukranian-born pastor who faced a potential life sentence for groping a 10-year-old girl at the Middleburg Heights Recreation Center pool this summer was instead sentenced to five years in prison on Thursday.

Dozens of 75-year-old Nikolay Kalka's friends and family wailed after Judge Kathleen Ann Sutula sent the ailing man to prison for five years, and exchanged words with the judge over the sobs of Kalka's wife and children.

"Twelve jurors found him guilty, not this court," Sutula replied. "Watch the video. God saw."

Kalka faced a potential mandatory life sentence with his first shot at parole in 10 years after a jury found him guilty last month of kidnapping the child with sexual motivation at the pool on May 11.

But Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Michael O'Malley's office asked Judge Kathleen Ann Sutula to sentence him instead on two counts of gross sexual imposition, which carried a maximum of five years in prison each.

Sutula ran the counts concurrent to one another, "only out of mercy, not because I don't think you deserve the full 10 years," she said.

Kalka will also have to register as a sex offender every six months for the next 25 years.

The girl and her friend, who have both turned 11, testified that Kalka grabbed her and rubbed her vagina and her breast while he held her for more than a minute under a water fountain in the kiddie pool.

Surveillance video of the incident showed Kalka holding the girl's head underwater, but not on his lap.

letter in Ukrainian

that an interpreter read out loud in English. He apologized for the hurt he caused the girls, but said he was just playing a game with them and did not touch the girl with any sexual intent.

"I thought that it was fine to do this as it would be in my Ukranian culture, where it is perfectly normal to engage in playful activity with children," he said. "Now I understand that this is unacceptable in America and I should not have done it."

Assistant Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Jennifer Driscoll called Kalka's explanation "misplaced blame," and said in no culture is it OK to grab a stranger's child and molest them.

"That to me is not a cultural thing, that is a human thing," she said. "The misplaced blame here is very troubling."

The mother of each girl spoke, and said both have been diagnosed with depression. The girl whom Kalka was convicted of touching said that her daughter also has PTSD, and asked Sutula to impose the maximum life sentence. But the other mother, who criticized Kalka for taking his case to trial and making the girls take the stand, said a life sentence was too harsh.

Sutula did not let members of Kalka's family speak on his behalf.

Kalka came to the U.S. in 1990 to flee religious persecution under the former Soviet Union and was held up as a moral pillar of the Ukranian community, his lawyer, Mark Marein said.

Marein said he questioned how the jury could determine that Kalka, who has never run afoul of the law in his life, decided to molest the child at a public pool in broad daylight and "throw away the rest of his years."

"I'm sick to my stomach that I have to stand up here and beg for mercy," Marein said. "He will die in prison if you send him there."

Sutula scolded Kalka before handing down her sentence. She said she didn't buy his excuse of a cultural misunderstanding, and labeled Kalka a pedophile.

She also said Kalka was not the first person with a clean record to come before her on child sexual abuse charges, or the first pastor. She would not have had a problem sending him to prison for life, had prosecutors not asked her to sentence him

"The cloak of the clergy does not make you immune from being classified as a pedophile by your actions," she said.

To comment on this story, please visit Thursday's crime and courts comments page.