The father of the sexual assault victim, left, and Raymond Brooks. (Courtesy of Cullman County Detention Center)

“Raymond molested me for either four or five years.”

Those words came from a 24-year-old Alabama woman, reflecting on what happened to her from the ages of around 4 to 8. (The Washington Post does not name sexual assault victims.)

Raymond Earl Brooks had adopted the victim’s mother. To the young woman, for several years, Brooks was her adoptive grandfather. Then, while she was still a small child, he began molesting her.

She told AL.com, “I don’t remember when it started happening but I know it was for a very long time. It was long enough for me to think it was completely normal and made me to feel that he actually loves me in a different kind of way than my mother and father loves me.”

In 2002, Brooks pleaded guilty to sexually abusing the woman and was sentenced to five years in prison, the Associated Press reported. But, according to the Alabama Department of Corrections, he only served 27 months of the sentence before being granted an early release in February 2005.

In the eyes of the victim’s father, Brooks’s punishment was insufficient.

The crime, and the rage it induced, festered in his mind.

Though it had been 13 years, the victim, now a mother of three, was still hurt, furious and terrified.

“He took my innocence away and only served like 18 months, and now I suffer daily from what Raymond did to me,” the victim, who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, said. “It’s not fair.”

So on June 8, 2014, she said something — it seemed so insignificant at the time, she can’t even recall her words — to her father.

“I [hadn’t] seen Raymond in years,” she said. “It was just something I said out of anger to my father.”

Her father, though, grew furious. He grabbed his gun and hopped on his motorcycle and drove down Highway 278, Berlin, Ala.’s main thoroughfare, dotted with churches, dollar stores and gas stations. The small buildings quickly turned to pine trees, as the father sped along the rolling hills out to the country, only stopping again when he reached Brooks’s rural home.

Outside that home he found an unarmed Brooks, who was 59 years old. He raised a gun and fulfilled a dream of vengeance.

He pulled the trigger. Brooks died on the spot.

As he was pulling back onto the road from Brooks’s home, an Alabama State Trooper arrested him.

“The guy was guilty of raping his little girl, and I guess he dealt with it for 12 years and it just built up,” Cullman resident Jason Lackey, a friend of the father, told the Associated Press. “I won’t say [he] had the right to go murder him, but I understand when he did.”

Added Lackey, “I’m 100 percent behind him.”

On Monday, the father pleaded guilty to the first-degree murder of Brooks and was sentenced to 40 years in prison, the Cullman Times reported.

(The Washington Post is not naming the father, as he shares the last name of the sexual abuse victim.)

The woman explained her father’s plea: “Basically he took it so that I didn’t have to relive the molestation and also be on the stand in front of a bunch of people talking about and bringing back memories of the molestation,” the daughter told AL.com. “My father was protecting me, like a father should do. He is an amazing father — actually the best. He loves us so much.”

Well before Monday’s guilty plea and 40-year prison sentence, the father’s brand of outlaw justice sparked a debate across the Internet — and even attracted some donations to the man and his family from several supporters.

A Facebook page titled “Family, Friends and Supporters of [the father]” was liked by 2,739 people and included one post that showed four young women in flip-flops and short-shorts holding handwritten signs reading “Car Wash.”

The post, liked by 112 people, stated, “We raised $172 at the carwash today!!!”

Another showed several people at another fundraiser — at which single women were auctioned to the highest bidder to participate in a motorcycle ride — wearing matching blue T-shirts reading, “A Father’s Love, Is Like No Other.”

One post invoked the Bible, particularly Hebrews 11:6, which reads in part, “without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to Him must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who earnestly seek Him.”

Its caption read, “If we have faith and believe and expect to receive His favor, our Lord will show up and show out. Today, I have faith that [the father] will be home really soon!!”

A Change.org petition seeking the man’s release received 986 signatures.

In a statement to HLN, the father’s lawyer asked all to consider the “mental anguish” the man suffered.

Over time; this situation has weighed heavily on [the father]; more importantly, on his daughter. Without discussing the facts related to the instant case; one need not wonder at the mental anguish and pain this family has suffered over the last several years. His family will tell you that few days pass without them questioning why such awful things occur; and, why they could not have done something to have stopped it. All men fear a day that they are unable to protect their children. [The father] is no different in this regard.

Not everyone, of course, believed the father was in the right. While some pointed to the fact that murder remains murder, regardless of motive, others pointed to his other crime.

On Monday, the father also pleaded guilty to attempted murder of another man, for which he was sentenced to 20 years in prison, to be served concurrently with his other sentence.

En route to Brooks’s home that day, at about 7 p.m. he made a pit-stop on the way at the Berlin Plaza Quick Stop in the neighboring town of Cullman.

He pulled up in front of the old gas station. Under a sign for Mike’s BBQ, featuring a pink smiling pig, sat an outdoor ice box.

Standing next to that box was a man his stepdaughter had been dating — who he thought had been abusive.

The father raised a gun and fired a single shot into the building. He missed the boyfriend, though, merely chipping one of the large windows in between signs hawking watery beer and cheap smokes.

Mike Hays, owner of Mike’s BBQ inside the Quick Stop and its colorful sign, pulled out his own weapon as the father burst into the store, gun in hand, looking for the boyfriend.

“He had the gun down by his side. He was calm, as calm as you are standing there now. But he had that look in his eye,” said Hays, who faced off with the father and forced him to leave.

With more on his mind, the father peeled out of the cracked concrete parking lot and back onto the highway.

For HLN, Catherine Connors opined, “Even if he did this a week after the crime, even if he did this in the most precise and careful way, even if he did this in the overwhelming, pure spirit of revenge … it would still be wrong. We could better understand it, better forgive it, but it would still be wrong.”

Patt Morrison in the Los Angeles Times found his widespread support worrisome. She wrote, “It’s an unsettling cheering section for someone who allegedly meted out a private punishment against a sex offender who pleaded guilty and served prison time.”

Morrison continued, “And when an Alabama father or a California mother usurps that role, they are not heroes, because vengeance is not justice. And justice, not just someone’s child, becomes a victim too.”

Perhaps the loudest voice saying the father was not a hero belonged to Hays.

“People here are calling him a hero for killing a child molester,” Hays told the Associated Press. “I’m calling him a psychopathic lunatic for endangering people’s lives, including mine.”

Hayes told HLN, “There were five or six people in the store. If the gun had been six inches over, it probably would have hit a 12-year-old-boy.”

Added Hayes, “They are making it like it’s okay to go up to a public place and leave your motorcycle out and shoot into an occupied business. I was able to go home and tell my son I loved him that night, and I almost wasn’t able to do that.”

The daughter whom the father was trying to protect has not found happiness or peace in the ordeal — just the opposite.

“I’m going through hell,” she said. “Everything comes back to me as to why this has happened. I feel like it’s my fault. I’m sad but yet mad.”