MIAMI-DADE COURTS
Guilty plea in drowning sex fetish case
An Ohio man opted to plead guilty in a Miami-Dade court to charges he arranged a sexual tryst that involved dunking young girls underwater.
BY DAVID OVALLE
dovalle@MiamiHerald.com
Midway through his trial in Miami, an Ohio man abruptly admitted Wednesday to wanting to quench his sexual cravings by violently dunking two girls underwater ``until the bubbles stop rising.''
Jeffrey Doland, 47, pleaded guilty to a slew of attempted sex crimes. He agreed to a prison term of 20 years, plus 10 years probation.
``This intolerable sexual perpetrator is out of the way so that he can never do his dirty deeds to anyone else,'' Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernández Rundle said.
In July 2007, Doland flew from Ohio to Miami to rendezvous with a woman he met online and believed would allow him to dunk her preteen daughters in a pool or bathtub until ``their lungs burst.''
Doland, a schools tech worker from Uniontown, Ohio, was actually chatting online with U.S. Secret Service Agent Eric Adams. The girls did not exist.
During trial, prosecutors David Sherman and Charlie Johnson showed wide-eyed jurors graphic chat transcripts that included Doland writing: ``I love long hair floating underwater. Cannot wait to see them drowning.''
Doland mulled dunking the girls by tying them to concrete blocks or using handcuffs.
With a diving mask in his black carry-on bag, Doland flew to Miami and gave $501 to an undercover female agent he believed was his online correspondent. Then he was arrested.
Defense attorneys Terrence O'Sullivan and Paul Donnelly had argued Doland was simply wooing a new adult romance by creating a ``fantasy world.''
``He started to realize the evidence against him was overwhelming,'' O'Sullivan said after the plea.
He said that Doland is a good man who simply ``went off the deep end.''
Doland had faced up to 90 years in prison if he had been convicted by the jury.
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