Man sentenced to 40 years for child rape

Dec. 8—Jason Ayers, 49, was sentenced to nearly 40 years in prison last month after he was convicted on 13 counts of rape of a child, involving three young girls.

Ayers' crimes stem back to the early and mid 2000s when the victims, now adults, were ages 5, 9 and 10 years old.

Ayers repeatedly raped the young girls over a number of years when he had access to them through his relationships with adult women, a release from the Spokane Police Department said.

An investigation began in 2017 when one of the victims reached out to the Spokane Police Department. Rape charges were leveled against Ayers in 2018, but he remained free until he was convicted in October.

The victims said they brought forward the abuse and testified at the trial in the hope that Ayers would never hurt other girls, the police department said.