For 13 years, Edward Kramer managed to avoid trial on charges he molested three boys. On Monday, with jury selection finally about to commence, the Dragon Con co-founder’s attorneys reached a plea deal that will keep their client out of prison.
Kramer pleaded guilty to three counts of child molestation in Gwinnett County Superior Court and was sentenced to 20 years in prison, with five to serve. He received credit for 26 months already served in jail and will be allowed to spend the next 34 months of his sentence under house arrest in Duluth.
Three counts of aggravated child molestation were dismissed and he was ordered to pay each of the victims $100,000.
“It’s done. It’s over. It’s checked out,” Gwinnett County District Attorney Danny Porter told reporters. He said the victims were pleased with the deal, which spared them from having to testify.
One of his victims, who had traveled from Texas to Lawrenceville to testify, said prior to the trial that he wanted to see Kramer spend the rest of his life in prison.
“My chief objective is to make sure he never does this to another child again,” said Brandon, now 26. (It is the policy of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution to not identify victims of sexual assault).
In court Monday, Brandon thanked Porter, saying the agreement allows him “to finally have some closure.” Kramer, he said, “underestimated a brother’s love.”
Brandon said Monday he came forward with allegations against Kramer in October 2000 because he feared his younger brother would be his next victim. He was the first child to allege he had been sodomized while spending the night at Kramer’s Duluth home. Weeks later, his older brother, 15 at the time, told police he, too, was molested by their mother’s onetime friend.
In 2003, just before his first trial date, another accuser emerged claiming Kramer, a family friend, abused him between January 1996 and August 2000.
Kramer maintains his innocence despite the guilty pleas, said defense co-counsel McNeill Stokes. He agreed to the deal, in which he’ll have to register a sex offender, because “he just couldn’t go through the trial,” Stokes said.
“Edward Kramer is a very sick man,” he said. “He’s almost paralyzed.”
A variety of maladies caused, Kramer contends, by a broken neck sustained during a 2001 jailhouse assault, had allowed him to avoid trial for more than a decade. On Monday, he appeared in court in a wheelchair with an oxygen machine feeding air into his nose through a tube.
Four years ago, a Gwinnett judge, citing Kramer’s poor health, postponed his trial indefinitely, but a 2011 arrest in Connecticut for endangering a child put his case back on the calendar.
Porter said he believes Kramer is still a threat to children. But, he added, Kramer will receive tougher supervision in Gwinnett than he would had he been sentenced to prison and quickly paroled, a likely outcome had the trial proceeded, Porter said.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if he’s back in court in 90 to 120 days” for violating terms of his sentence, he said.
Kramer is prohibited from having any contact with children and cannot leave Gwinnett County without a judge’s permission for the next 20 years. A violation could land him in prison for up to 60 years.
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