Orange County Mom Gets 12 Years for Sex With Boy She Met on Xbox Live

The 37-year-old who pleaded guilty to second-degree rape of a 13-year-old Maryland boy has been sentenced to 12 years in prison.

was sentenced Wednesday by Judge William O. Carr of the  in Maryland. She will serve her sentence in a Maryland Division of Correction facility.

She was sentenced to 20 years, eight of which were suspended by Carr. She pleaded guilty to the charge June 2.

Hicks had posed as a 23-year-old woman on the Xbox Live service in September when she met the Maryland boy and began chatting. The interaction escalated to phone calls, texts and e-mails, officials said. Those e-mails are alleged to have included sexually explicit images and movies sent by Hicks.

Hicks flew to Maryland over the Thanksgiving weekend and had sex with the boy at his home while his parents were sleeping in the house, officials said. "Romantic" text messages were found on the boy's phone by members of his family, who then confronted him about it.

Hicks was  by police after admitting to having sex with the boy.

Upon release, Hicks must serve five years of supervised probation. She is prohibited from contacting the boy and his family and is not permitted to have unsupervised contact with anyone younger than 18. She was also ordered to undergo sex-offender treatment and register as a sex offender for the rest of her life.

“We have an obligation to protect our boys from online solicitation and online predators in the same way we protect our girls,” Diane Adkins Tobin, the prosecutor in the case, said in a statement.

The case was investigated by Trooper Michelle Workman of the Maryland State Police, the , assisted by the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, the FBI, and the U.S. Marshals Service.