Abused by the badge
For toy.
He was a police officer.
She was 15 years old.
He met her in a neighborhood park at her elementary school when she ran away.
Then, he sexually abused her.
They served in police departments big and small. They were new recruits and seasoned veterans, patrol officers and chiefs of police. They understood the power of their guns and badges. In many cases, they used that very power to find and silence their victims.
A Washington Post investigation has found that over the past two decades, hundreds of law enforcement officers in the United States have sexually abused children while officials at every level of the criminal justice system have failed to protect kids, punish abusers and prevent additional crimes.
Police and sheriff’s departments have enabled predators by botching background checks, ignoring red flags and mishandling investigations. Accused cops have used their knowledge of the legal system to stall cases, get charges lowered or evade convictions. Prosecutors have given generous plea deals to officers who admitted to raping and groping minors. Judges have allowed many convicted officers to avoid prison time.
All the while, children in every state and the District of Columbia have continued to be targeted, groomed and violated by officers sworn to keep them safe.
James Blair, a Lowell, N.C., police officer, met a 13-year-old girl who ran away from home. He offered to help with her school work and presented himself as a mentor. Months later, court records show, he got the girl pregnant.
Convicted in 2017
Neil Kimball, a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy, was accused of sexually abusing a woman after stopping her near a hotel. Prosecutors concluded there was insufficient evidence to file criminal charges. Kimball was still allowed to become a special victims bureau detective. Then he sexually abused a 15-year-old girl whose case he’d been assigned to investigate.
Convicted in 2019
Brian Hansen, a Nevada, Mo., police officer, brought a 16-year-old girl who was interested in becoming a cop on ride-alongs. According to state investigators, he sexually abused her in his patrol car and at a police shooting range. When Hansen pleaded guilty to statutory sodomy, he was sentenced to probation.
Convicted in 2022
Cases like these are not unique. The Post identified at least 1,800 state and local law enforcement officers who were charged with crimes involving child sexual abuse from 2005 through 2022.
Reporters spent more than a year unearthing thousands of court filings, police records and other documents to understand who these officers are, how they gain access to children and what is — and isn’t — being done to stop them.
The Post also conducted an exclusive analysis of the nation’s most comprehensive database of police arrests.
This database, managed by Bowling Green State University, tracks news reports of arrests of law enforcement. Of the hundreds of thousands of sworn officers in the United States, only a small fraction are ever charged with crimes. And not all arrests are reported in the news media. But from 2005 through 2022, Bowling Green identified about 17,700 state and local officers who were charged with crimes, including physical assault, drunken driving and drug offenses.
The Post found that 1 in 10 of those officers were charged with a crime involving child sexual abuse.
This type of police misconduct has gone largely unrecognized by the public and unaddressed within the criminal justice system. When pressed by The Post, some police officials, prosecutors and judges admitted that they could have done more to hold officers accountable in the cases they handled. But nationwide, there has been little reckoning over child abusers within the ranks of law enforcement.
"This is heinous conduct that we cannot tolerate,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney General Kristen Clarke, who heads the division of the Justice Department that prosecutes officers accused of civil rights violations. Members of law enforcement who have exploited their positions of power, she said, have left child victims with “no recourse and no one else to protect them.”
Who are the 1,800 officers?
Officers charged with child sex crimes worked at all levels of law enforcement, on forces as big as the roughly 33,600-officer New York Police Department and as small as a two-officer agency in Gauley Bridge, W.Va.
The officers pictured here are among those convicted of serious crimes involving child sexual abuse, such as rape, sexual assault and child molestation, among other charges.
99%of arrested officers were male.
66%of arrested officers had more than five years of service
47of those arrested were chiefs of police, top sheriffs or other agency heads.
Nearly 40%of convicted officers were not sentenced to prison.
How are children targeted?
Nearly three-quarters of kids in The Post’s analysis were teenagers. Officers were rarely related to the children they were accused of raping, fondling or exploiting.
Police and court documents show that abusive officers frequently spent months befriending and grooming kids. Many used the threat of arrest or physical harm to make their victims comply.
After cops were charged with child sex crimes, some agencies tried to distance themselves in news reports by saying the alleged misconduct happened while officers were off duty.
But not all law enforcement leaders believe that distinction matters. In Lake Wales, Fla., where three officers have been charged with crimes involving child sexual abuse since 2005, Police Chief Chris Velasquez said these kinds of accusations must be taken seriously no matter when or where the alleged misconduct occurred.
“We have to be able to maintain the trust of the public,” Velasquez said. “People see us as law enforcement regardless of whether we’re on duty or off duty.”
But The Post found that in cases across the country, even if the abuse occurred while officers were off duty, they regularly met their victims through their work.
How officers met victims through their jobs
On patrol:
Speeding tickets
Domestic violence calls
Rape investigations
Suicide attempts
Curfew enforcement
Noise complaint
Finding runaways
Making arrests
Witnesses to crimes
Youth-focused assignments:
School resource officers
Boy Scouts’ Police Explorers
Youth cadets
Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.)
Ride-alongs
Police Athletic League
Crosswalk duty
Community outreach:
Fundraiser
Community center
Restaurants
Neighborhood walk
A skating rink
A haunted house
Officers were charged with a wide variety of crimes involving child sexual abuse. Some officers faced charges related to the possession, production or distribution of child sexual abuse photos or videos. Though the specific names of charges can vary across states, the majority of arrested officers were charged with crimes involving the direct abuse of children, including rape and forcible fondling. Read our methodology to learn more about how offenses were categorized.
Complaints about a school police officer were ignored.Then a 15-year-old got pregnant.
When Alexis learned she was pregnant her sophomore year, the 15-year-old asked her high school resource officer, David Huggins, what to do. She trusted his advice as an authority figure in her school and community in rural Kansas. And, she knew, the baby was his.
Huggins is one of dozens of officers charged with crimes involving child sexual abuse who worked primarily in schools and frequently found their victims there. The Post’s investigation revealed that school resource officers have unparalleled access to children, often with very little supervision.
In Linn County, officials in law enforcement and the school district repeatedly missed or ignored red flags about Huggins’s behavior, according to interviews and records reviewed by The Post.
The 44-year-old school resource officer allowed Alexis, a bubbly blond cheerleader, to eat lunch with him in his office, she said. He didn’t always leave the door open. He messaged late at night. He told her she was mature and complimented the body she tried so hard to keep thin. He even befriended her dad.
Other parents complained to a school board member after they saw Huggins driving Alexis home from school in the spring of 2017, according to police records. But the rides didn’t stop.
Alexis, whom The Post is identifying by her first name, wasn’t the only student Huggins was pursuing. In the summer of 2017, a mother wrote to Linn County’s superintendent after the school resource officer friended her daughter on Facebook.
“I feel uncomfortable for her and on edge with him,” Chasity Greene wrote in an email obtained by The Post. “I have also heard from other people how they do not trust him around their girls; which makes me even more uneasy.”
Paul Filla, the sheriff at the time, already knew about other problems with his deputy. Filla was Huggins’s boss at a previous department, where he had been accused of stalking a girl who worked at a grocery store, according to a deposition Filla later gave.
Filla described that complaint as unfounded, and again, the sheriff downplayed concerns when they were raised about Huggins’s behavior as a school resource officer.
“Friendliness with kids sometimes comes across like it’s something other than what it is,” the sheriff, who has since died, wrote in an email to the superintendent in 2017.
Just weeks later, Alexis told The Post, Huggins instructed her not to tell anyone that he’d gotten her pregnant.
“‘Cops don’t do good in jail,’” Alexis recalled Huggins saying to her.
She lied about the identity of the father to her parents, who had agreed to let her get an abortion.
It was only when the Kansas Bureau of Investigation got involved — after even more complaints from a teacher and one of Huggins’s own colleagues — that officials got a search warrant. They found explicit photos of the teenager inside his bulletproof vest, according to state investigative records.
In 2019, Huggins was sentenced to just over 15 years in prison after pleading guilty to aggravated indecent liberties with a child.
“I just want to apologize to everybody for everything,” he said at the hearing.
While listening to him, Alexis realized how this man, decades older, had manipulated her into thinking abuse was love. How this officer, whose job was to protect and serve, had instead left her pregnant at 15.
Others could have stopped him, but didn’t, said Alexis, now 22. She is especially angry at the sheriff, who died in 2022: “If there’s one person that holds all the responsibility other than [Huggins] himself, it was him.”
An officer assaulted a girl on camera in a police station.His punishment: Two weeks in jail.
“I’m not going to kill you,” Officer Alec Veatch said to a 15-year-old girl lying on the floor, pinned against his body.
It was around 2 a.m. on Nov. 12, 2021, and the girl, who had just been on a ride-along with 24-year-old Veatch, was now at the Pleasantville, Iowa, police station with him, alone.
Inside an interview room, Veatch held the teenager down. He threatened her with a taser. He wrapped his arm around her neck until she passed out. A camera in the corner of the room recorded it all.
When a prosecutor took a look at the evidence, including a recorded confession from Veatch that he’d also groped and kissed the teenager at his home and cut her with a knife, he offered the cop a deal that would put him in jail for 14 days.
At the sentencing hearing in May 2022, Judge Elisabeth Reynoldson talked about Veatch: his young age, his two children, his potential for rehabilitation. The judge, who did not respond to messages seeking comment, never mentioned Veatch’s role as a police officer, and simply referred to the cop as “somebody in a position of authority,” according to a transcript. She agreed to the 14-day deal. He would also spend the rest of his life on the sex offender registry.
And when Veatch asked that he be allowed to serve his jail time on work release, the prosecutor didn’t object and the judge granted his request. He was given permission to spend most of his two-week sentence at his construction job, rather than in a cell.
“I can accept that a lot of people think that I should have gotten a lot harsher of a sentence. I can’t even necessarily disagree with them,” Veatch told The Post in a May phone interview. “But it worked out how it worked out. And I’m glad that it did.”
Cases like Veatch’s show that even when law enforcement officers admit to sexually abusing children, the consequences they face depend largely on the actions of prosecutors and judges, who have wide discretion on what charges to file, what deals to make and what consequences convicted officers deserve.
A Post analysis revealed that officers who took plea deals were sentenced on average to eight years behind bars, while those who were convicted by juries were sentenced on average to 18 years.
Many prosecutors The Post spoke with said they pushed for plea agreements, which are a common resolution in the criminal justice system, to spare victims from having to testify against their abusers.
In Veatch’s case, the prosecutor, Warren County Attorney Doug Eichholz, said he was concerned for the victim’s mental health.
“I think everyone agrees that his conduct warranted a long prison sentence, but that ignores the realities facing the victim and her family,” Eichholz told The Post.
With no trial in Veatch’s case, few learned the details of how an officer with a troubled history used his badge to prey on a vulnerable teenager.
While the girl didn’t want to talk about what had happened, her mother agreed to describe what the family had been through. The Post is identifying the teenager by her middle initial, R.
R. had grown up saying she wanted to become a police officer. But during her freshman year of high school, she started struggling and even ran away from home. So when R. asked in the fall of 2021 to go on a ride-along with Officer Veatch, her mother felt hopeful her daughter was planning for her future.
She knew nothing about Veatch’s alarming past. When he was 15, Veatch was charged with burglary after admitting to breaking into a garage and stealing women’s underwear, a hatchet, a knife and a copy of Anal Action magazine, according to juvenile court records obtained by The Post. It was later amended to criminal trespassing, and the case was closed after he was monitored by juvenile court services
Still, Veatch found jobs with three different police departments in less than three years. Employment records from his time at the Pleasant Hill Police Department in Iowa detail repeated issues, and he eventually resigned. An April 2021 separation agreement obtained by The Post stated he would not apply for a job with the city again.
Soon after, Veatch said, he got hired by the Pleasantville Police Department as the only officer working the late shifts. Joe Mrstik, the police chief who also served as the city administrator, later testified in a deposition that he let Veatch sleep at the police station because the officer was having marital issues.
In November 2021, when R. left school without permission, her mother contacted Veatch to ask for help. A few days later, after dropping R. home following a ride-along, Veatch messaged her mother at 1:15 a.m. that he needed R. to come to the station to fill out a statement for an arrest she had witnessed. Her mother didn’t think to question a police officer.
Veatch brought R. to the interview room, where he had laid out sleeping bags and a pillow. In a deposition given earlier this year, Veatch admitted to kissing, fondling and groping the teen in the interview room but couldn’t explain why that footage of them was missing from the recording obtained by state investigators. The police chief declined to comment.
When R. still hadn’t arrived home at 6 a.m., her mother called 911. She later learned that R. had been with Veatch the whole time.
After the teen finally returned, a special agent with the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation questioned R. outside her house. In a recorded interview obtained by The Post, the agent asked the 15-year-old over and over, “Who came on to who?”
Then state investigators gave Veatch a polygraph test. He failed.
“I’m a piece of shit,” the officer said in a recorded interview.
Veatch admitted to investigators in his interview he had taken the teenager to his home in early November, on the same day that her mother had asked for help finding R. He got her drunk. He told investigators there was kissing. Groping. He put R. in handcuffs and cut her with a kitchen knife.
He was charged with 10 counts, including multiple felony sex crimes, and faced life in prison. When he was arrested, Veatch told The Post, he thought he would end up behind bars for a long time. R.’s mother assumed he would, too.
But after rejecting multiple offers from the prosecutor’s office, Veatch said he agreed to a deal allowing him to plead guilty to a felony charge of willful injury and a misdemeanor charge of assault with intent to commit sexual abuse. In exchange, Veatch would be on the sex offender registry for life and spend several years on probation. He would get a total of 14 days in jail.
“I am aware that officers do receive special treatment,” Veatch said. “I felt entitled to something like that.”
But ultimately, he told The Post, he doesn’t believe that happened in this case.
The teen’s mother thought otherwise. Her daughter no longer wanted to go to school and had lost all trust in authority figures. She told The Post she didn’t think she had the power to push the prosecutor or judge for more.
At Veatch’s sentencing hearing, R.’s mother called the officer’s actions “unforgivable.”
“My daughter will be battling her scars for the rest of her life,” she said in a statement delivered from the witness stand. “And as her mother, I think you should be reminded of those violations by the consequences bestowed upon you for the rest of yours.”
Veatch apologized at the hearing, saying, “If I could give all of my days going forward from today to take back the last six months, I would. I just hope that going forward I can do better, I can be better.”
Less than a year after Veatch was released from jail, he admitted to violating his probation.
According to court filings, Veatch acknowledged to his probation officer that he had posted suggestive photos of himself online and exchanged messages on Reddit and Sex.com with people he thought were minors. He was also around other children, including a teenager he said he found attractive.
Again, Veatch could have been put in prison. Instead, he spent several months at a residential treatment program for offenders before being released
How many officers avoid prison?
Child sex crimes are among the most difficult cases to investigate and prosecute. Kids are often frightened and embarrassed. They may have been groomed to feel protective of those accused of exploiting them — or may fear for their safety if they admit what has happened. The hurdles are even higher when the abusers are members of law enforcement wielding the power of their badges and guns.
The Post identified dozens of officers who were charged with trying to thwart investigations, destroy evidence or intimidate victims and their families.
Cases sometimes fell apart after kids became too scared to cooperate. In other instances, prosecutors were reluctant or faced resistance to aggressively pursue charges against their colleagues in law enforcement with whom they work closely and rely upon for investigations. The Post surfaced cases in which officers were accused in police reports of sexual contact with minors but were charged only with non-sex crimes such as simple assault or official misconduct.
Prosecutors have broad discretion in the types of charges they bring, the plea bargains they offer and the cases they are willing to take to trial. Judges play a critical role at sentencing hearings in determining what punishment officers deserve.
The consequences: Nearly 40 percent of convicted officers avoided prison sentences.
Tracking criminal cases
Criminal cases can take years to work their way through the criminal justice system. The Post used data from Bowling Green’s police crime database and thousands of court records to track outcomes for about 1,500 officers who were charged with crimes involving child sexual abuse from 2005 through 2020, before the pandemic caused delays and backlogs in courts.
Some cases were impossible to track because prosecutors struck deals that allowed officers to accept responsibility for their crimes without a conviction being placed on their record. Others were permitted to have their criminal records sealed after meeting certain conditions
The Post analyzed the outcomes for about 1,500 officers charged with crimes involving child sexual abuse from 2005 through 2020, before the pandemic caused delays and backlogs in courts.
Here’s what happened to those officers in the criminal justice system:
83 percent of officers were convicted via a judge, jury or plea deal.
17 percent of officers were not convicted. They may have been acquitted by a jury, had their cases dropped by prosecutors or struck an agreement to have their charges dismissed after they met certain conditions.
Of the officers who were convicted, 61 percent were sentenced to time in state or federal prisons, and 15 percent were sentenced to time in local jails.
24 percent received probation, fines or community service.
Of those who were given time in jail or prison, 52 percent were sentenced to 5 years or less.
26 percent were sentenced to 5 to 15 years.
Just 21 percent were sentenced to more than 15 years.
Officers often did not serve their full sentences. For the hundreds of officers whose incarceration dates could be obtained by The Post, they served on average roughly 63 percent of their sentences before being released.
Some got out even earlier.
Marc Dody served just two years of a six-year prison sentence for the statutory rape of a 15-year-old girl while he was a Troy, Mo., police officer. Within three months of being released in 2020, he was charged with sexually abusing another child. He was convicted in 2023 and was released again in May.
Why does abuse keep happening?
The number of teens sexually abused by law enforcement officers no longer surprises Philip Stinson, a former New Hampshire police officer who created the nation’s most comprehensive database of officer arrests.
"This happens to communities all across the country, but it’s not on people’s radar,” said Stinson, a Bowling Green criminal justice professor. “And then, police chiefs adhere to the bad apples theory, where they say, ‘There’s nothing to see here, we got rid of this problem when we fired them.’”
Many institutions that can be exploited by predators — including schools, churches and youth programs — have come to treat child sexual abuse as an always-present risk that requires specific prevention efforts, such as limiting one-on-one interactions between kids and adults.
But The Post found that law enforcement agencies across the country have done little to directly address child exploitation in hiring practices, policies that govern officer conduct and responses to complaints. Child abuse prevention experts say that without clear messages that inappropriate behavior with children is not tolerated, employers could leave potential offenders believing they won’t be caught.
Hiring and vetting
At a time when police departments across the country face staffing shortages and are desperate to hire, there are no universal requirements to screen for potential perpetrators. There is no national tracking system for officers accused of child sexual abuse.
Background checks: Departments hired officers who had been accused — or sometimes convicted — of child abuse, domestic violence and other serious crimes.
Hidden past acts: After being accused of inappropriate behavior with children, some officers resigned before internal investigations were complete. Then they applied at other departments. Their previous employers didn’t always disclose the reason they’d left.
Keeping problem officers: In some cases, officers fired for their conduct have appealed their terminations through their police union protections, won their jobs back and then were convicted of abusing kids.
Rodney Vicknair, a New Orleans police officer, was hired despite a history of arrests and a conviction for battery of a juvenile. In 2022, he admitted to sexually assaulting a 15-year-old he’d met when he drove her to the hospital for a rape kit.
Austin Edwards, a Washington County, Va., sheriff’s deputy, was barred from owning a gun in Virginia when he was hired by two law enforcement agencies. In 2022, he spent months grooming and soliciting nude photos from a 15-year-old girl he’d met online. Then he drove across the country and used his badge to gain entry to her house, the victim stated in a lawsuit. He killed her mother and grandparents and kidnapped her before taking his own life.
Donald Ivory, a Euclid, Ohio, police officer, was fired after he was charged with domestic violence and pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct. After filing a grievance, he was rehired. Prosecutors said he then sexually abused a 13-year-old girl and threatened to take her to juvenile detention if she did not give him her phone, which contained evidence of the crime. In 2022, Ivory was convicted of assault, intimidation and attempted obstruction of justice, among other charges.
Supervising and training
Law enforcement agencies now teach officers to intervene when they see misconduct such as excessive force. But training and protocols explicitly aimed at preventing child sexual misconduct by officers are rare, according to Strategies for Youth founder Lisa Thurau, whose organization focuses on law enforcement treatment of juveniles. In some cases identified by The Post, officers’ inappropriate actions were witnessed by their colleagues but never reported to supervisors. In others, complaints about an officer’s behavior with children were dismissed, only for additional victims to come forward.
Texting and social media: Unlike many schools, law enforcement agencies typically do not have specific policies governing how officers can interact with kids. This means officers can text, call and message on social media with children they have met on the job without breaking any rules.
Working alone: In departments of all sizes, officers routinely work alone. Abusive cops often took advantage of the lack of supervision to violate children while on duty.
Grooming while on duty: Despite GPS and body cameras, patterns of abusive officers — repeatedly returning to a child’s home, giving children rides or bringing kids to police stations — sometimes went undetected for weeks, months or even years.
Timothy Barber, a South Bend, Ind., police officer, used his work computer to text teenage girls he met on the job and offered to bring them candy or money. In 2022, Barber pleaded guilty to sexually abusing a 16-year-old in his patrol car.
Jerric Gilbert, a Carrollton, Ga., police officer, was twice the subject of complaints by parents. They said he was acting inappropriately with their daughters, including one he repeatedly texted, asking if she was dating anyone and if she would send him a photo. The department, records show, determined his behavior did not violate any policies and allowed him to work at an elementary school. Then, in 2023, he was convicted of molesting an 11-year-old student with developmental disabilities.
Steven Burgess, a Jackson County, Mo., sheriff’s deputy, was on duty at 2 a.m. when he came across a 15-year-old and her friends at a park. He ordered her friends to leave, handcuffed her, sexually assaulted her in his patrol car and threatened to get her in trouble if she told anyone. In 2010, he was convicted of depriving her of her civil rights under the color of law.
An officer charged with abusing a teen got probation.Now the victim is trying to change the law.
The teenager tried to ignore her nausea as she walked through the doors of the Pennsylvania Capitol in February. She tried to stop her hands from trembling in meetings with lawmakers. She tried to keep her voice steady as she explained why she had come:
A York police officer was charged with sexually abusing her when she was 15 years old. He was sentenced only to probation.
Prosecutors allowed the officer to plead guilty to one misdemeanor: corruption of minors. In Pennsylvania, at least six other law enforcement officers charged with crimes involving child sexual abuse have been given similar deals since 2008. They, too, were sentenced only to probation.
Now, the teenager is trying to make sure officers will face more serious consequences in the future. Her story is the inspiration for Pennsylvania H.B. 1847, which would make corruption of minors a felony in all cases where the defendant holds a position of authority, including as a police officer.
The Post is identifying her by G., her first initial. G. met Officer Joseph Palmer in 2021, during a neighborhood walks program her parents had encouraged her to attend. Palmer was assigned to be the York City Police Department’s juvenile engagement officer.
The department had announced on Facebook that the 27-year-old officer was someone parents could trust to help their children. He played football with neighborhood kids. He danced at the high school prom.
Then, a police report stated, he twice abused G. in his car in the parking lot of a bowling alley.
After G. confided in her older sister, her parents called the head of the police department, Commissioner Michael Muldrow, whom they had befriended at community events. They said Muldrow, who declined to comment, promised that Palmer would be held accountable
But then, her parents recalled, prosecutors told them they were dropping all five felony charges and letting Palmer plead guilty only to misdemeanor corruption of minors.
At a sentencing hearing last August, Palmer admitted to “sexual activity” and “sexual conversations” with G., according to a court transcript. Judge Harry Ness accepted the plea agreement and sentenced Palmer to three to five years of probation with sex offender treatment, but no time on the sex offender registry.
G. refused to attend. “How does a man who was sworn to protect children get so little time, when so much time has been taken from me?” she told The Post.
The office of District Attorney Dave Sunday, who is running as the Republican nominee for Pennsylvania attorney general, issued a statement in response to The Post’s questions about the plea deal offered to Palmer, saying any assertion that prosecutors show leniency to officers who are accused of sexually abusing children is false: “We engaged in individualized justice and balanced all appropriate considerations in making a recommendation to the Court.”
At the sentencing hearing, Palmer’s attorney called his actions a “mistake,” saying Palmer has always acknowledged responsibility for his behavior: “The shame will hang over his head. … He’ll never wear a uniform again proudly. He understands that.”
But in a May interview with The Post, Palmer denied any sexual contact and said he only accepted the plea agreement to avoid prison time.
“What they charged me with was nothing I did,” Palmer said. “I was put in a corner that, if I didn’t take a plea, there’s a chance that the jurors would have found me guilty, just based on her testimony.”
Four months after walking free, Palmer violated the conditions of his probation by using social media and visiting a school campus, prosecutors said. Ness resentenced Palmer to a minimum of six months in prison. Palmer was released in May.
Ness told The Post that first-time offenders are rarely incarcerated for misdemeanors like the one Palmer faced. At the time of the sentencing, the judge said he thought probation was an appropriate outcome and consistent with state guidelines. But now, Ness is questioning his own decision.
“You have me sitting back thinking, should I have done more?” the judge said. “Part of my job is to protect society.”
While Palmer was behind bars, G. and her father, Chris, had dozens of calls and meetings with Pennsylvania legislators about H.B. 1847. The bill was introduced last year by the family’s state representative, Republican Joseph D’Orsie, and was co-sponsored by nearly a dozen other lawmakers.
But the bill has yet to receive a hearing or a vote.
G.’s father, who is considering starting a nonprofit for children abused by members of law enforcement, said he will return every year until the bill is passed.
“None of this is going to undo what happened to my daughter,” he said. “This is for the families that are inevitably going to be in a similar situation as us.”
G., now 18, is trying to decide if being an advocate is worth it. At the first event for sexual assault survivors she attended, a presenter reminded the young people in the room that they could always turn to police officers for help. G. fled in tears.
In May, she returned to the state Capitol. Her hands were still trembling. But she had a new reason for coming back. A few weeks earlier, another York police officer had been charged with child sexual abuse.
Two girls reported abuse by the same officer.They waited 10 years for a trial that never happened.
In December 2012, an Alabama police officer was charged with repeatedly raping a 15-year-old girl. Less than a month later, another teenage girl came forward with a strikingly similar story: The same Tuskegee police officer, Levy Kelly Jr., had promised her mother he would look out for her, and then, the girl said, sexually assaulted her when they were alone.
Indicted on more than a dozen counts of rape and child enticement in two counties, Kelly was facing up to life in prison. But then, the court proceedings were rescheduled — more than 10 times.
By 2022, 10 years after he was arrested, a trial still hadn’t happened. Kelly remained free on bond. And soon, the charges against him would disappear for good.
The first girl, Alexandria Quinn, told prosecutors she couldn’t bear to keep waiting for a trial. She asked for her case to be dismissed. But prosecutors didn’t just drop that case. They dismissed all the charges against Kelly, including those involving the second girl who came forward.
“We have evidence on all of them, obviously,” Chief Deputy District Attorney Michael Weldon told The Post. “But when you don’t have a lot of time, you got to pick the ones you’re gonna go” after.
Weldon said someone from his office contacted the second girl, Diamond Mabson, but would not say when. Mabson, however, said she did not know the case was being dropped and didn’t hear from prosecutors before it was. Until she was contacted by The Post, she believed Kelly was incarcerated.
“It was like a slap in the face,” said Mabson, now 28. “I went through all this emotionally, just for nothing to happen.”
Quinn and Mabson feel they weren’t just failed by the criminal justice system, they were completely forgotten.
In the rural Alabama county where Kelly was first prosecuted, jury trials are held for only two weeks twice a year. Every time the case was rescheduled, Kelly’s attorneys asked for more time, citing their scheduling conflicts with other cases, medical procedures, medical leave, the medical procedure of a friend and international travel, among other reasons.
Year after year, judges granted Kelly’s requests.
In a May phone interview with The Post, Kelly said he, too, wishes his cases had gone to trial. He blamed prosecutors for the decade of delays, said he was targeted because he “knew too much” about corruption in Tuskegee. He denied all wrongdoing, including all allegations of sexual abuse.
“You really can’t defend a lie, you just have to take it to court. And unfortunately, I didn’t have my day in court,” Kelly said.
The Tuskegee Police Department hired Kelly in 2005, when he was 31 years old. By then, he’d already worked at four other law enforcement agencies in the state, according to Alabama licensing records. He’d also been convicted of impersonating a police officer — which he acknowledged, but told The Post was the result of a misunderstanding. Tuskegee’s current police chief, Jennifer Jordan, said she was unfamiliar with any specifics about Kelly’s hiring or history.
Within two years of joining the force, police and court records show, Kelly was accused of raping a woman he’d met on duty. Kelly, who denied the allegations during a polygraph, was determined to be “truthful” by investigators.
That same year, 2007, is when Quinn said she met Kelly at her apartment complex. She was a 14-year-old cheerleader and choir singer who escaped her tumultuous home life by spending hours playing “The Sims” and watching Lifetime movies. She kept diaries filled with doodle hearts and bubble letters.
Kelly was 18 years older than her. Quinn said he would stop by her apartment and take her places when he was on duty. The sexual abuse, she said, went on for around two years.
“You had took something From me I could never get back,” Quinn wrote in her diary in 2011.
The next year, soon after Quinn started dating someone, Kelly arrested her. A police report stated Quinn was drinking underage, which she denied. As Kelly took her into custody, records show, he deployed pepper spray in her face.
It wasn’t long before two state investigators appeared at her door, wanting to know about allegations they’d heard about Kelly’s sexual contact with her. They had been called in to investigate Kelly for shooting a man when he was off duty, during a domestic dispute.
Quinn had detailed notes to show the investigators of everything that she said had happened — all documented in real time, in her diaries.
The alcohol charge against Quinn was dropped. Kelly was charged with rape.
Mabson, then 17, saw Kelly’s face on the news. She confided in her aunt, and then told detectives, that Kelly had sexually abused her multiple times in recent years. The family told investigators that Kelly responded to a call for assistance at their home, then offered to be a “father figure” to Mabson and her two sisters, police records show.
When Mabson was 15, Kelly drove her to get a tattoo in Butler County. Mabson told detectives how, on that day, Kelly bought her half a dozen wine coolers, then brought her to a motel room.
“She repeatedly told Officer Kelly 'no,’” the detectives noted.
Charged with raping Mabson in both Macon and Butler counties, Kelly pleaded not guilty and continues to maintain his innocence.
His accusers, he said, “were coerced. ... I just know it was a witch hunt.”
Kelly spent 18 months in jail before being released on bond. Then, everything seemed to stall.
While Quinn waited for the criminal case to progress, she filed a civil lawsuit against Kelly and the city of Tuskegee in 2014. This, too, took years.
When the civil case finally went before a jury in 2021, the city was found not liable. But Quinn was awarded $2 million in damages after a ruling that Kelly had violated her civil rights by sexually abusing her and using excessive force on the day she was arrested and pepper-sprayed.
Quinn, who still keeps a duffel bag filled with her diaries, court records and news clippings about her case, said she has not received a cent.
In 2022, the year after the civil trial, Kelly’s attorney in the criminal case asked for another delay.
Quinn, then 29, still lived in Tuskegee, where she worked with special-needs students. She was sick of everyone in town knowing her as the girl from the police scandal. Her anxiety about potential retaliation from Kelly or the police department was sometimes so crippling, she couldn’t get out of bed. She thought that if she finally dropped the criminal case, maybe she could begin to move on.
“It’s like a roller coaster that never ends,” Quinn said. “I’ve been let down so much.”
Quinn recalled that during their meeting, Weldon, the prosecutor, apologized for failing her.
“I did not want to dismiss this case,” Weldon told The Post. “Ultimately, she made her decision.”
He eventually dismissed all three cases against Kelly in his county: Quinn’s, Mabson’s and the 2012 off-duty shooting.
But in Butler County, where Kelly was charged with raping Mabson on the day he drove her to get a tattoo, the case was still pending.
Prosecutor Michael Godwin told The Post that Kelly demanded his charges in Butler County be dropped, too. Given Macon County’s decision to dismiss the cases there, Godwin chose to do the same. He never contacted Mabson.
In explaining his decision to a reporter, Godwin made several incorrect statements about the case: He said there were not multiple teens who came forward, there were no allegations of violence and that Mabson was in a relationship with Kelly.
“I’m not in any way excusing his behavior, but it’s not what we would call a sexual predator,” Godwin said.
After The Post told Godwin about the factual discrepancies, he reconsidered his statements: “In her case, there has been injustice,” Godwin said. “I take full responsibility.”
Mabson still has the tattoo Kelly drove her to get — a delicate butterfly, inked onto her leg. She also has a degree in social work, an apartment far from Tuskegee, and a 2-year-old daughter of her own
She would never, she promised herself, put faith in someone to watch over her daughter just because they had a badge.
Kelly, meanwhile, said he has been “hiding out” and doing temp jobs. Now that all his cases are closed, he said, he is considering whether he wants to return to a job in law enforcement.
“Due to my work reputation and being a good officer,” he said, “the door is still open.”
The lasting impacts
Nightmares. Flashbacks. Fear of patrol cars. Children who are sexually abused by law enforcement officers sworn to protect them face lifelong consequences. The Post reviewed dozens of impact statements given by victims and their families at the sentencing hearings of abusive officers. They describe what it was like to be betrayed by someone with a badge — and how it forever changed them.
“I feared for my life because he was a police officer. He was supposed to be the law.”
Girl abused in Kentucky
“I looked at this encounter as a way to get my foot in the door of policing. I found out the hard way that I was knocking on the wrong door.”
Girl abused in Michigan
“He didn’t do anything to the strong-minded girls, only the ones that were already a little messed up so he could take them in as his ‘daughters’...which, if I might add, is even more disgusting - and break them.”
Girl abused in Minnesota
“I never did anything about the physical abuse because I loved him. He had total control over me. Anything he wanted, I did.”
Girl abused in Louisiana
“If I tried to tell him I didn’t want to see him anymore, he would threaten me by saying, ‘Don’t let me catch you driving ... because I will stop you and give you a ticket.’”
Girl abused in California
“He stated he had people driving by my house and watching me and my family and friends.”
Girl abused in Massachusetts
"I lost everything I had; my goals, my future, what I wanted to do with my life. … I have to live with this every day and I am in constant fear of retaliation from this man.”
Girl abused in Kentucky
“You didn’t take responsibility. You didn’t confess. And now after all these lies, you are going to ask the judge to trust you and not put you in prison.”
Girl abused in Indiana
“Our son has been, throughout these years, suicidal. ... He’s been diagnosed with PTSD from this. And we just feel probation is not enough.”
Mother of a boy abused in Arizona
“Police officers are supposed to be there to help you and give you comfort ... Instead, when I see a police officer, I have a panic attack.”
Girl abused in Pennsylvania
“The true heroes today are the victims that came forward. … They have saved other children that could become the next victim. It is a cruel world for children when they not only have to stand up to an adult but also an officer of the law.”
Mother of a boy abused in Minnesota
“You were a predator with a badge. You thought you were above the law.”
About this story
Reporting by Jessica Contrera, Jenn Abelson, John D. Harden, Hayden Godfrey and Nate Jones. Riley Ceder and Claire Healy also contributed to this report.
Design and development by Tucker Harris. Additional design by Laura Padilla Castellanos and Emily Sabens. Graphics by Daniel Wolfe. Photos by Carolyn Van Houten.
Lynda Robinson and Tara McCarty were the lead editors. Additional editing by Anu Narayanswamy, David S. Fallis, Courtney Kan, Christopher Rickett, Brandon Carter, Amy Nakamura, Kyley Schultz, Ashleigh Wilson, Jay Wang and John Sullivan. Photo editing by Robert Miller and Troy Witcher. Design editing by Christian Font. Graphics editing by Reuben Fischer-Baum. Video editing by Alice Li. Additional images by iStock.
Court records research by Razzan Nakhlawi, Jennifer Jenkins, Monika Mathur, Alice Crites and Cate Brown. Additional research by Aaron Schaffer.
Additional production and support from Matthew Callahan, Meghan Hoyer, Chloe Meister, Jordan Melendrez, Candace Mitchell, Sarah Murray, Andrea Platten, Victoria Rossi, Anthony J. Rivera, Kevin Schaul, John Taylor, Peter Wallsten and Elana Zak.
Additional contributors from the Police Integrity Research Group at Bowling Green State University are Philip M. Stinson, Chloe Wentzlof and Eric Cooke.
Additional contributors from the American University-Washington Post practicum program are Alex Angle, Madeleine Sherer, Ben Baker, Nicholas Fogleman, Daniela Alejandra Lobo, Mirika Rayaprolu, Nami Hijikata, Solène Guarinos, Alexandra Rivera, Ron Simon III, Cameron Jennings Adams, Dima Amro and Siddhi Prabhanjan Mahatole.