PITTSBURGH – A former school security guard accused of keeping a teenage runaway in his home for a decade and having sex with her pleaded guilty Tuesday and was sentenced to five to 15 years in prison.

Thomas John Hose, 49, took in the 14-year-old girl and kept her from leaving the tiny home he shared with his parents and son, prosecutors said. Tanya Nicole Kach, now 25, has said the two regularly had sex during her captivity.

He pleaded guilty to all counts just as his trial was about to start. Kach approved of the plea.

Hose, of McKeesport, had been a security guard at Kach’s school, and Kach went to live with him after running away in February 1996.

In recent years, Kach said she had been allowed out occasionally. In March 2006, she revealed her identity as a runaway to a deli owner she had befriended, leading to Hose’s arrest.

During the hearing, Kach read a letter to Hose, her voice faltering and her eyes welling with tears.

“I just want to know why you did what you did to me for 10 years. Why?” Kach asked. Hose took away her innocence and made her feel as though no one loved her, she said.

She said Hose controlled what she wore and ate and even how she styled her hair. She said he repeatedly told her: “Oh, you’re just a pretty face. You’re so stupid, you’d be nothing without me.”

Hose apologized: “Only God knows how sorry I truly am.”

But he also said Kach repeatedly told him: “Thank you, because without you, I’d be dead or in the streets.”

Hose’s comments drew a rebuke from Allegheny County Judge John Zottola: “I think, Mr. Hose, you give yourself too much credit.”

Kach is in therapy but has finished her first semester of college and is volunteering at a senior home, said Lawrence Fisher, her attorney in a civil case against Hose.

While Kach may have run away, Fisher said she “almost immediately” found herself unable to leave. “When she attempted to leave, she was threatened with her life,” he said.