photo by: Douglas County Sheriff's Office

Lukas Armstrong

Before he was even 3 years old, a boy was brutally abused by his mother’s boyfriend, his grandmother alleges — so much so that the child told her that “he will break me” if it kept happening.

But when she reported the abuse in 2019, she had no idea that it would take more than four years, four prosecutors and an appeal for the case to be resolved. Nor did she know that it would never even go to trial in the first place, or that the man would plead no contest to lesser crimes, or that he would end up with probation in accordance with state guidelines for those crimes.

The man who was accused of abusing the boy is 29-year-old Lukas Sebastian Armstrong, of Olathe, who was dating the boy’s mother at the time. He was originally charged with one felony count of abuse of a child by torture or cruelly beating a child and one felony count of aggravated battery for incidents that were alleged to have taken place between August and September of 2019.

But in April of this year, he took a plea deal that reduced his charges to two felony counts of aggravated endangerment of a child. And on Monday, Judge Stacey Donovan sentenced him to 17 months in prison, which she then suspended to two years of probation, following the state guidelines.

Before the sentence was handed down, the grandmother had the chance to address the court, and she didn’t hide her dissatisfaction with the plea deal and the legal setbacks in the case.

“I regret putting my faith in this process,” she said. “I regret putting my faith in these people.”

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The grandmother said Monday that the abuse against her grandson began when he was 2 1/2 years old, and that it was brutal. She alleged that Armstrong threw the boy down a flight of stairs, burned him with cigarettes, sodomized him, threw him into a TV and hit him so hard that a blood vessel in his eye burst.

One day, she said, when she was going to send the boy home to his mother’s house, he didn’t want to go because Armstrong would be there.

“He is mean. He will break me,” the grandmother said the boy told her.

The grandmother said she reported the abuse to police in September 2019. Charges were filed almost a year later, and she said she was hopeful that justice would come.

“In the beginning, I was an important part of the team,” she said.

But then the delays began, starting with changes in prosecutors, she said. Court records indicate that the case began in 2020 while former District Attorney Charles Branson was in office. But when Suzanne Valdez unseated Branson and took over as DA in 2021, the prosecutor who was originally assigned to the case left the office. In the next six months, two other prosecutors were assigned to the case; both left the office while the case was pending.

“Each time the prosecution was handed over, we had to start over,” the grandmother said. “Game plans for trial were lost; case notes were not passed. The ball was dropped.”

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Eventually, Deputy District Attorney Joshua Seiden took over the prosecution, and the case was set to go to trial on Dec. 6, 2021. But that would be delayed, too, because of a dispute about whether the state had improperly withheld a piece of evidence from the defense.

The defense wanted some cell phone data from Armstrong that police had collected. Seiden first told the court that the data didn’t exist, according to court records, but after an officer testified in court that the records did exist, the DA’s office eventually sent them to the defense — just three days before trial.

The defense then argued that Seiden had intentionally or negligently withheld the data, and that the case should either be dismissed or continued. But Donovan, the judge, chose instead to sanction the state, preventing it from using the data at trial. The state then appealed, and the case was on hold until after the Kansas Court of Appeals issued its ruling in July 2023, affirming that the state should not be allowed to use the data.

A new trial date was set for February 2024, and Armstrong retained a new attorney, Scott Toth. But the trial never came. Toth asked for a delay to get caught up on the case, and in April Armstrong entered a no contest plea to the reduced charges.

On Monday, the grandmother voiced her frustrations with how the case had turned out.

“No contest,” she said. “I never knew how much those words could affect me. So much wasted time. So many sleepless nights, health issues and ruined relationships.”

She said her grandson has suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and is afraid of heights and stairs. Only recently, after countless hours of therapy, has he been able to go down a slide at the playground, she said. And while she is glad that the process is over — and that she can delete the dozens of photos from her phone that showed the injuries the boy had suffered — she thought Armstrong deserved a much harsher punishment than what he would likely get.

“There is no place for this monster except for hell,” the woman said.

Armstrong declined to speak at the sentencing hearing.

After the grandmother spoke, Seiden said that “nothing the state could say would capture the emotion she conveyed.” He asked the court to follow the plea agreement and to sentence Armstrong in accordance with the sentencing guidelines. And Donovan sentenced Armstrong within the guidelines, but increased his underlying sentence as much as she could, from the 14 months that was recommended in the plea agreement to 17 months.

As part of the plea agreement, the state also moved to dismiss additional misdemeanor charges for violating a protection order, domestic battery and criminal damage involving the child’s mother in May 2020.

Armstrong has two additional felony convictions for drug possession in Johnson and Douglas Counties in 2022.