A 19-year-old has been sentenced in a case in which he was accused of having sex with a girl he met at The Villages Charter School.
Terrence Keljin Kennedy Jr. had originally been charged with lewd or lascivious battery following his 2022 arrest. However, earlier this month he pleaded no contest to a lesser charge of child abuse without great bodily harm in Sumter County Court. He has been placed on probation for five years with two of those five years to be served under the stricter provisions of community control.
Kennedy had asked the girl in May 2022 to visit his home in Oxford Oaks, according to an arrest report from the Wildwood Police Department. The 2022 graduate of The Villages High School instructed the girl to climb in through his bedroom window so surveillance cameras would not catch her coming in.
“Once inside the residence the two had sexual intercourse and fell asleep,” the report said.
The next morning, the girl’s mother realized her daughter and her vehicle were not at home. She called her daughter, who told her mother she was at the park in Oxford Oaks. Later that same morning, the girl went with her aunt and mother to the beach. The girl admitted she had sex with Kennedy the previous night. The mother took her daughter to an emergency room and the ER doctor called law enforcement. A rape kit was processed and the girl’s underwear was taken as evidence. The rape kit and underwear were sent to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement for serology testing. The underwear revealed a male’s DNA profile as well as the victim’s DNA profile. Buccal swabs were obtained from Kennedy and tested at a lab at FDLE. The test linked the DNA to Kennedy.
