DUBLIN — A Livermore man has agreed to serve a four-year prison term — with the potential to reduce it by half — for a brutal attack on his girlfriend at the encampment where they both.
Terry Pugh, 39, was initially charged with shocking crimes like torture, rape, and forcible oral copulation. Through a plea deal with Alameda County prosecutors he pleaded no contest to assault with the expectation that the four-year term can be cut in half with good behavior behind bars, court records show.
Pugh was arrested last year, and has been in jail ever since. He gets credit for the time he has already spent behind bars.
Pugh was accused of sexually assaulting, choking, beating, and threatening his girlfriend after getting jealous that she’d allegedly been with another man at the Livermore encampment where they lived. The woman testified in court at Pugh’s November 2024 preliminary hearing, stating she was in fear for her life several times throughout the ordeal.
She testified that Pugh used a BB gun that they had to kill mice and rats near their tent to sexually assault her. At one point, she said he put one of his earbuds in his own ear, put the other in her ear, and asked “what song I wanted to listen to while he killed me.”
“I just laid there and cried and listened to music,” she testified, “And prayed like I never prayed before.”
The woman had mental illness, including psychosis, and planned to move out of state shortly after the hearing, according to court records. There was also a legal debate about whether the sex they had was consensual, as she indicated she agreed to have sex with him at one point.
“I am hesitant to discharge that (rape) count because the circumstances of the context are so awful and so grim,” Judge Elisa Della-Piana said at the hearing. “But I do think she said fairly unequivocally that she was signaling consent for the vaginal intercourse.”
Della-Piana ultimately did throw out the rape count, court records show.
Pugh is set to be formally sentenced next Jan. 28, court records show. He has also been ordered to stay away from the victim for 10 years. At the preliminary hearing she testified he sent a letter to a mutual friend asking her to claim she made up or hallucinated her claims so that some of the charges would be dismissed.
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