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A judge Tuesday sentenced Joshua Tackett to 70 years to life in prison for child abuse resulting in the death of the 22-month-old son of his then-girlfriend.

"The nature of the offense is abhorrent, and I think that the evidence presented has adequately displayed that," Lancaster County District Judge Kevin McManaman said.

On March 12, 2023, a Sunday, Rudy Requejo-Ybarra Jr. was life-flighted to Children's Nebraska hospital in Omaha, but it would be too late to save him. He died there of a head injury that caused bleeding on his brain.

At trial, photos of the boy, whose family called him Rudy Junior, showed clear signs of ongoing abuse. He was bruised and battered, with broken ribs, a healing broken leg, a black eye and head injury.

"The violence was extreme and the jury found beyond a reasonable doubt you were responsible," McManaman told Tackett on Tuesday.

He gave Tackett another 15 to 20 years for selling marijuana in a school zone.

Tackett, who denied he caused the boy's injuries, said nothing first and intends to appeal.

One of his attorneys, Tim Noerrlinger, asked the judge to take into consideration that the jury, which in July found him guilty of child abuse resulting in death and the delivery charge, had acquitted him of a second count of child abuse resulting in serious injury for the boy's broken leg weeks before his death.

He said it suggested the jury had found Tackett guilty not for causing the physical injuries but for failing to get Rudy Junior medical help sooner. 

Another jury last month found the boy's mother, Brittany Cook, guilty of child abuse resulting in death under that theory.

"In this case, I would submit to the court the most logical inference to make of that is that the jury found Mr. Tackett was complicit in not providing timely care to Rudy," Noerrlinger said. 

He suggested the culpability should be less, an idea Deputy Lancaster County Attorney Amy Goodro called "simply absurd."

"Time and time again Mr. Tackett simply cannot be trusted in this community," she said.

In this case, she said, the evidence showed that Tackett "intentionally and repeatedly physically abused and tortured ... Rudy Junior." In addition to the physical pain the boy felt, it's hard to imagine the mental turmoil he must have endured, given his hearing loss.

"Unable to hear, he sat in a world of silence. The last visions he likely saw were the fury in the defendant's eyes and the back his mother turned on him. The defendant murdered a 22-month-old child. To treat this case like anything else would be a grave disservice to Rudy and frankly a moral injustice," Goodro said.

Moments later, Rudy Requejo-Ybarra Sr. read a victim-impact letter, there to speak for his son, who now has a baby brother he'll never get to meet.

"Junior was truly my everything," he said.

He said that even though his "little guy" was deaf, he was loud in a way that would wake up the neighborhood. Whether from laughing or crying, "there was no volume for this little dude."

Requejo-Ybarra told Tackett what he did to him and and his family turned their lives upside down. And the images won't go away, though he's tried to forget them.

"The bruising and yellowness I saw on his body of the old bruises. The blackness and blueness of the most recent ones I'll never forget," he said.

Requejo-Ybarra told Tackett he took from him, and no matter what happens, it will never bring his son back.

"The only thing I can hope for is that I'll find peace again, and that you're going to be punished by the court or by God," he said.

On March 12, 2023, after Cook brought Rudy Jr. into the ER at CHI St. Elizabeth unresponsive at about 4 p.m., more than four hours after finding him unable to wake up, she told investigators her son had fallen down the stairs and slammed into a baby gate a couple of days earlier but seemed fine after.

Cook later acknowledged the fall never happened.

And phone records show she had searched on her phone the night before about whether a toddler could sleep with a concussion before she went to the casino with Tackett, leaving Rudy home alone with his 3- and 4-year-old sisters.