GRAND RAPIDS (AP) — A federal judge has sentenced a Michigan man who pleaded guilty to kidnapping and murdering his ex-girlfriend’s 2-year-old daughter to a second life sentence.

U.S. District Judge Robert Jonker on Friday sentenced Rashad Trice to life in prison without the possibility of parole on charges brought in Ingham County Superior Court in the girl’s death and to 60 to 90 years in prison for attacking her mother, the Detroit News reported.

Prosecutors say Trice got into an argument with his ex-girlfriend in her Lansing apartment in July 2023. She stabbed Trice, who responded by stabbing her multiple times and sexually assaulting her. He left.

The woman went to her mother’s apartment in the same complex, leaving behind her 1-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter, Wynter Cole Smith. Police were unable to find the girl.

Trice crashed his car in a Detroit suburb after police spotted him, but the girl wasn’t with him. Searchers used dogs, drones and helicopters to search for her along a highway between Lansing and Detroit.

FBI agents eventually found the girl’s body in an overgrown Detroit alley, strangled with a telephone cord.

Federal prosecutors took on the case because the car and other tools used in the crime were made outside of Michigan.

Trice pleaded guilty in March to a federal charge of kidnapping resulting in death, acknowledging that he had taken the girl from her home as part of a dispute with her mother. Prosecutors dropped the charge of kidnapping a minor, but Trice’s plea earned him a mandatory life sentence.

“Mr. Trice deeply regrets these tragic events and accepts responsibility for his actions,” Scott Graham, one of Trice’s attorneys, said in an email to The Associated Press on Friday.