SOUTH BEND, IND. — She’d been told her words would make a difference, so the teenager stood before the judge and leaned toward the microphone.
She tried not to look at the man who was pleading guilty to sexually abusing her.
“You were a police officer, and you were in uniform,” she said, reading from the victim impact statement she’d spent weeks writing. “You were on duty.”
She was 16 years old when South Bend Police officer Timothy Barber showed up at the Chick-fil-A where she worked in the summer of 2021. Barber, who was 20 years older, knew the girl wanted to be a police officer. He offered to give her rides home in his patrol car.
Instead, what Barber did to her in that patrol car led to him being charged with child seduction, official misconduct, public indecency and public nudity.
“My whole life I had been taught to trust police officers. I looked up to you. I listened to you. I obeyed you,” the girl said.
With the permission of the girl and her parents, The Washington Post is identifying her by her middle name, Anne.
Anne had to miss a day of high school to be at this September 2022 hearing, where a judge would decide what punishment the police officer deserved.
The investigator and prosecutor had assured Anne and her parents that Barber would be held accountable for his actions.
Anne understood what that could look like. A week earlier, when a local softball coach was convicted of molesting one of his teenage players, he’d been sentenced to 30 years in prison for abusing his power and betraying his community.
But Barber was a police officer, and his hearing was in a different courtroom with a different judge. Those details mattered, and not just in South Bend.
A Post investigation has found that hundreds of law enforcement officers accused of child sexual abuse have evaded serious consequences in the criminal justice system, even after they admitted to wrongdoing.
The Post identified at least 1,200 officers convicted of charges stemming from child sexual abuse from 2005 through 2020. Nearly 40 percent of those convicted officers avoided prison sentences.
In cases across the country, prosecutors offered generous plea deals to officers who admitted to raping, groping and exploiting minors, citing the need to bring cases to a close or spare victims from testifying. Prosecutors sometimes did so despite the objections of victims and their families. Then, judges approved those agreements — or made sentencing determinations of their own — that allowed abusive officers to walk out of courtrooms without any prison time.
In Missouri, a cop pleaded guilty to statutory sodomy after he was accused of sexually abusing a 16-year-old girl at a police shooting range. In 2022, he was sentenced to five years of probation.
In Tennessee, a deputy charged with raping a 14-year-old girl faced up to 90 years in prison. When he pleaded guilty in 2022 to aggravated assault, he received three years of probation. The victim, according to the sentencing transcript, called the plea deal “comical.”
In Texas, a school police officer accused of having a 14-year-old student perform oral sex at a middle school pleaded guilty in 2017 to an “improper relationship.” After five years of probation, his record was cleared.
In Indiana, Anne was determined to see Barber led out of the courtroom in handcuffs. She told prosecutors she was willing to go to trial to testify about what Barber had done to her in his squad car, in his uniform, wearing his gun and badge.
The prosecutors told her that it would be better for her if they worked out a plea agreement.
Then they made a deal with Barber’s defense attorney. The charges he faced carried a maximum potential sentence of 18.5 years. Instead prosecutors agreed to limit his sentence to no more than four years.
The prosecutors did not tell Anne they also agreed to stay silent on how the officer should serve his time: behind bars or on probation. This judge could decide that Barber, too, would never spend a day in prison.
From the podium, Anne, now 17 and just starting her senior year of high school, spoke directly to Barber.
“You told real police officers that I was a liar. Like the phony coward you are, you blamed me,” Anne said. “And now after all these lies, you are going to ask the judge to trust you and not put you in prison.”
Anne and her parents didn’t know that the judge, Jeffrey Sanford, had spent part of his career as a deputy city attorney for South Bend — and defended police accused of misconduct.
“Judge Sanford, I am asking you to impose the maximum prison sentence,” Anne said.
When she rejoined her parents, her father had a tear running down his cheek. They’d come to the sentencing alone. The detective who investigated her case wasn’t called to testify, and the prosecutors presented no other witnesses.
Barber had come to the hearing with his wife and a group of people he’d been working with at a construction company after the police department put him on unpaid leave. His family wrote letters on his behalf. So did his pastor.
When it was Barber’s turn to make a statement, he apologized to his wife, to his family, to the community, to the South Bend police and to Anne. Barber later told The Post that in that moment, he feared what prison would be like for a police officer convicted of a child sex crime.
“I took an oath as an officer to serve and protect the community, and I spat on that oath as I served myself and my own interests,” said Barber, according to a transcript of the hearing. “Instead of protecting you, I became the monster I swore to protect you against.”
When he was done, Judge Sanford explained the dilemma he said he was facing.
“I see a person who, you know, puts a pretty good foot forward, has lots of support from the family, what a great guy he is,” Sanford said. “And then I have somebody, on the other hand, who is wearing a uniform who is going to a drive-thru restaurant … in a police vehicle in uniform basically hitting on a 16-year-old.”
“So,” the judge said, “what’s the right punishment here?”
Nearly a year earlier, on a Monday night in October 2021, Anne’s mom noticed that something seemed off with her daughter. The teen’s phone was buzzing again and again.
She asked to see Anne’s phone — a parent power move she pulled every so often, she said. But for the first time, Anne, her quiet child who never caused trouble, refused.
Instead, the teen bolted to the bathroom and tried to lock the door, furiously deleting text messages off her turquoise blue iPhone. Her mom lunged at her and snatched it away as Anne burst into tears.
Her mother began scrolling. Then she found the name “T. barber” with a cop emoji next to it and messages her daughter had exchanged moments earlier.
Oct 4, 2021, at 9:49 p.m.
Guessing you don’t need a ride home tonight do you?
Oct 4, 2021, at 10:04 p.m.
I am driving by right now
i wanted to give you a ride
This can’t be happening, her mom thought to herself. Anne had talked all summer about police officers hanging out at the Chick-fil-A, where the store offered free meals to members of law enforcement.
She barged into Anne’s room: “Did anything happen with you and a police officer?”
Anne was curled up on her bed, hiding her head under her pink comforter. She refused to talk.
Anne thought about how Barber had told her not to say anything. She didn’t want to get him in trouble. Everyone, she worried, would blame her anyway.
Anne knew her parents were loyal supporters of the police. They’d once wanted to become officers themselves, and Anne had shared that ambition. Her Facebook page showed pictures of her dressed as a cop for Halloween.
After a sleepless night, her mom confronted the teen about the messages again. Anne confessed that a South Bend officer had driven her home from work twice and pressured her to have sex in his patrol car. He didn’t use protection.
Her horrified parents thought about contacting the South Bend police. But they worried their complaint might not get taken seriously, so they called a friend who worked at a neighboring police department.
An hour later, Jon Yoder, a detective with the Mishawaka Police Department, was heating up leftovers in the office microwave when he received an email about a teenager and a South Bend cop.
He headed to his commander’s office and closed the door.
Jon Yoder, a police detective assigned to the St. Joseph County Special Victims Unit, worked the criminal case against Barber.
Yoder, then 36, had grown up watching episodes of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” before becoming a special victims detective himself for St. Joseph County. His text alert was the iconic “dun dun” sound of the TV show’s gavel. He’d investigated hundreds of sexual abuse cases in his career. This was the first time his suspect was a police officer — but it wouldn’t be his last.
Special victims unit Commander Amy Bennett told him to keep the Barber case quiet. Their team had detectives from multiple jurisdictions, including South Bend, working together in one building.
They didn’t want the unit’s South Bend detective to learn they were about to investigate Barber or do anything to cause the appearance of a conflict of interest. Yoder knew he needed to work quickly.
By the next day, he’d arranged for Anne to meet with a forensic interviewer who was specially trained in child sex crimes. The detective took notes, which The Post obtained, while watching their conversation in a room across the hall.
Snot and tears soaked through Anne’s pandemic face mask as she explained how it all began, in July 2021, during her lunch break at Chick-fil-A. She was talking to a co-worker about her dream of becoming a police officer. The next day, Barber, who’d overheard her, walked up to her table. He gripped his bulletproof vest. He told her she could ride along with him if her parents signed some paperwork.
One requirement was that she had to be 18. Anne told Barber she was only 16. He still gave her the form and got the teen’s phone number. She asked her parents to sign off, but they refused.
As much as they supported the police, they didn’t like the idea of Anne being alone with an older man. Anne was a homebody who’d spent her whole life in Indiana. This summer was her first foray into the adult world, with her first job.
Barber didn’t wait to hear back about the form before reaching out. Anne knew it was a little weird to have a police officer messaging her, but his interest in her future made her feel special.
She saved his number in her phone as “T. barber” beside a cop emoji.
Barber hadn’t been a police officer long. He’d grown up in California, attended Northland Baptist Bible College in Wisconsin and had a string of jobs, including a stint at a Chick-fil-A in Florida, according to his police department employment application. He told Anne that he moved to Indiana for its lower cost of living and had become a youth director at a Baptist church.
Joining the police department wasn’t a calling, he said in an April phone interview with The Post. He was married with young kids.
“Everyone else is always saying that they dreamed about being a police officer growing up,” Barber said. “I was not like that. It was more like I needed a job that I can make money for my family, and it was a job that I knew I could do.”
He listed his most recent work as a handyman when he applied in 2018 to the South Bend Police Department, which was facing an officer shortage. It’s unclear what the department found when checking his background because officials heavily redacted the personnel file they released to The Post.
By the time Barber met Anne in 2021, he said, he was working long hours as a patrol officer.
Anne started noticing him at the Chick-fil-A almost every day. He texted her constantly. He would later admit to sending her more than 1,300 messages in less than three months from his work laptop.
He wanted to know her perfect date, how many kids Anne wanted. He told her he was jealous of her boyfriend. He divulged details about his marital problems. He said his wife had caught him cheating.
When Anne’s friends didn’t have room to drive her to the county fair, Barber suggested other plans.
July 31, 2021, at 5:31 p.m.
I am sorry you got shafted by your friends
I would take you but we would be there for like 10 min before we would have to leave
well lets make it a reality. ;)
maybe then so I don’t go to jail
The officer knew Anne didn’t have her driver’s license yet. He repeatedly offered to take her home after her night shifts at Chick-fil-A, where she usually worked until 10 p.m.
Aug 2, 2021, at 8:55 p.m.
I forgot how much I like your eyes
I am guessing you don’t need a ride tonight
Anne told the forensic interviewer that she took Barber up on his offer a few days later, when her ride from work bailed.
The officer was still on duty, according to department schedule records, as he drove fast along dark winding roads, his hand on her left leg, then her inner thigh. It was past 10 p.m. when he pulled into an area she’d never been before.
“I was alone with him at a warehouse parking lot. And it was pitch black back there,” Anne told the interviewer, according to Yoder’s notes.
Barber’s hand was still on her leg.
“He told me that age didn’t matter. He said that he ‘looked in the books’ and found that there’s nothing wrong with a 36-year-old sleeping with a 16-year-old,” Anne said.
She felt frozen, unsure of what to say. She didn’t know where he had taken her or what would happen if she didn’t do what he wanted. Maybe, she thought, if she had sex with him once, he would leave her alone.
He didn’t. He kept texting her. He offered to give her a ride again a few weeks later. She said she thought nothing would happen because he’d told her he felt guilty about the last time.
Then, she recalled, he took her to another empty parking lot late at night. When he noticed a nearby security camera, he drove to a dead-end road.
“I felt like I had to because he is a cop,” Anne told the interviewer. “He could do something to me.”
Both times, she said, Barber unzipped his pants but kept on his uniform and his gun.
In September 2021, Barber brought Anne to another parking lot but left, she said, after he noticed a security camera. Then Barber drove the teen in his patrol car to this dead-end road.
About a half-hour after Anne finished talking to the forensic interviewer, South Bend police confiscated Barber’s patrol car and placed him on leave.
The next day, Yoder drove up Barber’s long driveway in nearby Elkhart, but Barber refused to talk to the detective without first consulting with his lawyer.
“I don’t want you to think that I don’t want to talk about it. I want to. I want this off my chest,” Barber told Yoder, who recorded the conversation. “I want to make sure I don’t say something that is gonna, like, incriminate me because I said it the wrong way or something.”
Meanwhile, Anne was at the hospital waiting for a sexual assault exam. Her mom had to sign the paperwork because she wasn’t old enough to consent.
“I didn’t want to say anything at first because I wanted to protect him,” Anne told the nurse, according to a medical report shared with The Post. “I didn’t want him to ruin his marriage or his family.”
Back at the office, Yoder reviewed the GPS coordinates for Barber’s patrol car. It placed the officer at Chick-fil-A almost every day of the past few months, sometimes multiple times a day.
Then he checked where Barber’s vehicle was on the nights when Anne described what Barber had done to her inside his patrol car. The GPS coordinates matched up with everything Anne said.
The detective uncovered other disturbing evidence. Anne said Barber exposed himself in his squad car at the Chick-fil-A drive-through, offered her candy and then forced her hand onto his erect penis. She still had a Snapchat video she took after he drove away that night.
“No, guys, no. I saw something of him that I did not ever want to see,” Anne recounted, as she stood shocked in the parking lot wearing her Chick-fil-A shirt pinned with a name tag. “I looked down in his car and it was just there. It was literally there. ... You can’t tell nobody, though.”
Aug 29, 2021, at 7:15 p.m.
how much was my candy so i can pay you back
it will cost you 2 nude pics. ;)
that will pay me back for the candy
Chick-fil-A workers the detective interviewed confirmed that Barber would often stop by and ask for Anne. The more the cop came around, the more upset she appeared. Anne had warned one of her teen co-workers to stay away from Barber because he was creepy and liked to flirt with girls.
In early October, Anne texted a friend that she was scared of Barber and that he had told her he would kill someone close to her.
“Dude that cop just came,” Anne messaged. “Im gonna get kidnapped.”
April Bray, one of Anne’s managers, told the detective that one night, the teenager came up to her crying.
“Girl, what is wrong with you?” Bray asked Anne.
“I just feel weirded out, I feel creeped out,” she said.
When Bray asked why, Anne pointed toward one of the tables. Sitting there in his police uniform was Barber.
Detective Yoder assumed that everyone on the South Bend force heard about the investigation once Barber was placed on leave. And yet, he said, not one officer or supervisor had stepped forward on their own with any information.
Only when Yoder questioned South Bend officer Jeremiah Hooks, one of Barber’s close colleagues, did the cop share that, weeks earlier, he’d received a letter from Barber’s wife, Alyssa. The two families had become friends after Barber and Hooks began working together.
In her letter, Barber’s wife revealed that she knew about her husband’s infidelity. Alyssa Barber — who declined to comment to The Post – had seen some of his inappropriate messages to other women and knew he had been to many of their houses “in absolute unfaithfulness.” She didn’t mention Anne by name but described concerns about Barber’s behavior at work.
“Tim really needs the help of honest friends at work to hold him to honesty. He meets with two pastors already weekly, but Tim could still hide sin at work because none of us are there,” she wrote. “He wants and needs you and Williams, if you are willing, to constantly hold him accountable at work for perverse humor, swearing, flirting, or other selfishness you observe.”
Hooks told Yoder that he agreed to be Barber’s “accountability partner,” butnever saw anything that raised concerns.
Barber, though, had downloaded messaging apps onto his work laptop, and used them to text multiple teenage girls and young women he had met on duty. These messages were never discovered by supervisors, according to Barber. When Yoder retrieved Barber’s texts, the detective said, it became obvious that the officer had been abusing his position.
Barber told a teen runaway he was upset that she didn’t invite him to her 16th birthday party and asked what she wanted as a gift. He messaged another teen runaway that he could bring over money to pay her traffic ticket. He asked a 21-year-old car accident victim why someone so beautiful was single. He offered to bring a third teen runaway a meal from Chick-fil-A. He apologized to a 21-year-old crime witness after he “moved way to fast” — weeks after she texted him to “please just leave me alone.”
Barber would later claim to The Post that he was “surrounded by temptation” because there were so many women interested in police officers.
“It wasn’t like I was out hunting,” Barber said. “It wasn’t like I used the badge to try to force sex on people.”
The detective’s last interview was with Zackary Overton, the officer present when Barber gave Anne the ride-along form back in the summer. Overton said Barber repeatedly stopped at the Chick-fil-A. Once, he’d seen the officer staring at the high school student.
“Thinking back on it all, I’m like ‘shit, what the fuck?’” Overton told Yoder.
With this much evidence, the detective knew he had everything he needed to charge Barber. A prosecutor agreed.
“You coming forward has now stopped that guy from doing this to other girls, okay?” Yoder told Anne at her house before the arrest. “So just know that you did a good thing.”
Yoder walks through the hallway of the St. Joseph County Special Victims Unit.
At 4:50 p.m. on Oct. 19, 2021, Yoder, with about a dozen other law enforcement officers as backup, arrived at Barber’s house. Yoder knocked on the front door wearing a bulletproof vest and body camera. He was carrying an arrest warrant with multiple charges: child seduction, official misconduct, public nudity and public indecency.
When Barber’s wife answered, Yoder asked to speak with him.
“I do not know where he is at this time,” she said, walking outside and closing the front door behind her as the detective’s body camera recorded their conversation.
Yoder was pretty certain that Barber was inside. And he knew there was a good chance that he had weapons too.
“Can you respect him enough or me enough to leave and he will turn himself in?” his wife pleaded.
Yoder, who’d had several suspects kill themselves before they could be taken into custody, remained calm but firm.
“We’re not leaving without him,” he responded. Yoder waited as she wagged her finger and shushed him. Then he threatened to call the SWAT team.
“I’m trying not to do this like this, okay,” he sighed. “I’m really not.”
“You are doing this like this,” she shot back. “I didn’t break the law.”
“I know you didn’t, but he did,” Yoder said.
“He did, you’re right,” she responded. “Just stay here.”
Barber finally emerged in sweatpants, a hoodie and a baseball hat. After he was handcuffed, the officer asked if his wife could take his wedding ring.
Detective Jon Yoder's body camera captures the moment that Barber is arrested. (Obtained by The Washington Post)
Barber spent one night in jail before posting a $10,000 bond and returning home to his family with a GPS ankle monitor. A day after his arrest, the city’s Board of Public Safety placed Barber on unpaid leave.
South Bend police posted Barber’s arrest on the department’s Facebook page, promising to terminate the officer if he were found guilty.
As the news spread, young women started coming forward to complain about the cop’s behavior.
There was Angie Robinson, who’d reported a missing dog to police. Barber responded by bringing candy to her home, Starbucks to her work and asking to take her out. Then, according to her interview with the detective, Barber requested photos and told her he was horny.
There was MaKenzie Keen, who met Barber in March 2020 after one of her family members was assaulted. He brought the 22-year-old chocolate-covered pretzels and sent a selfie from his squad car. He told her that he had pictured her without a bra and asked for explicit photos.
Barber sent a selfie in uniform to MaKenzie Keen in 2020. He met the 22-year-old South Bend resident after one of her family members was assaulted.
Other South Bend residents took to Facebook to share their stories. One of them, Kari Clark, told The Post how the officer had tried to bribe her teen daughter to go on a date.
“I told him his behavior was inappropriate ... and very unprofessional,” she’d posted online.
As Anne learned about other accusations, she didn’t know what was worse: that she wasn’t the only one, or that if someone at the police department had stopped Barber sooner, she never would have met him.
None of the women said they ever heard from South Bend officials about their complaints – even though Barber’s messages to them could be considered fireable offenses under the department’s disciplinary policy.
Police chief Scott Ruszkowski declined to answer questions from The Post. In court records, the city denied “failing to investigate, discipline, or otherwise hold accountable its police officers whether on or off duty.” South Bend also argued it wasn’t directly responsible for the harm that Barber caused Anne.
Now that Barber was out of jail, Anne worried he might try to find her. Yoder had tried to assure her that a no-contact order would keep him away.
Anne had come to trust the detective. But now, he told her, it would be up to the prosecutors to handle her case. He said they’d look out for her. Even though Barber was a cop, the detective promised, he was going to be held accountable.
After Barber’s arrest in 2021, Anne learned that others had troubling interactions with him.
Rebecca Soto, a St. Joseph County deputy prosecutor, was floored by the amount of evidence Yoder had gathered. Prosecutors in sexual assault cases often struggle to corroborate the details of crimes that happen behind closed doors. But with Barber, Soto said, there were hundreds of explicit text messages, GPS location data and witnesses who could talk about Anne’s fear.
Soto, then 42, had once wanted to be a police officer, just as Anne had. But after an injury in graduate school, Soto said she decided that rather than catch criminals, she would make sure they went to prison.
At Soto’s first meeting with Anne, she asked the teenager what she wanted out of the case.
Anne didn’t hesitate: Barber should spend time behind bars and never work as a police officer again.
She didn’t understand then how much power Soto and her boss, prosecutor Ken Cotter, would have over the case. It would be up to them how aggressively to push for a trial, which charges against Barber to keep and what recommendations to make to a judge.
Soto told The Post that she worried that if the case went to trial, some jurors could look at Anne, who went to tanning salons and wore ripped jeans, and come to the conclusion that the girl was “inviting whatever sexual attention she gets.” Some of her texts to Barber were flirty. She accepted a second ride home.
Under the law, Soto knew none of that mattered. The evidence was overwhelming: Barber had used his job as a police officer to commit a sex crime against a minor.
But to a jury in a police-friendly town?
“You’re going to get eaten alive,” Anne remembered Soto warning her in a meeting with the teenager’s parents and civil attorney.
Soto recalled telling Anne that this was a possibility, not a certainty.
Anne told Soto that she could handle a trial. She was willing to testify in front of a jury about what Barber had done — and all it had already cost her.
At school, the teen said, she was harassed by classmates who’d figured out she was the girl in the police scandal on the news. One boy had asked if she’d liked it. Another bent himself over a desk and pretended to be handcuffed. Her parents, too nervous about her safety at Chick-fil-A, told her to quit.
There was one place where Anne could take out her rage: the wrestling mat. When she was a freshman wrestler, she pictured the faces of the middle school girls who tormented her and prompted her to transfer schools.
As a junior, she imagined Barber’s face on her opponents. She had her best season yet.
While Anne finished her school year, the prosecutors were working out a deal with Barber’s attorney, David Francisco, who did not respond to messages from The Post seeking comment. He was adamant that Barber didn’t deserve to go to prison, citing his lack of a criminal record, his young children and his community service as a police officer.
St. Joseph County deputy prosecutor Rebecca Soto, second from right, and her boss, Ken Cotter, second from left, discussed the terms of the plea agreement they offered to Barber. The case was investigated by Yoder, left, and, at right, Special Victims Unit Commander Amy Bennett.
The child seduction counts that Barber was facing carried the stiffest penalties. In Indiana, where the age of consent is 16, these charges are brought against teachers, cops, guardians and others who use their position of authority or trust to sexually abuse children.
In exchange for a guilty plea from Barber, Soto proposed dropping four of the officer’s six charges, leaving one count of child seduction and one count of official misconduct. He would get 10 years on the sex offender registry and a maximum of four years in prison.
And she offered something else: Soto would not give a recommendation to the judge on how or where she thought Barber deserved to serve his sentence. Her boss, Cotter, signed off on the deal.
Though she’d warned Anne’s family that Sanford was a lenient sentencer, Soto told The Post she wouldn’t have to ask the judge for prison time because he’d already know that’s what she wanted.
“I didn’t feel like it was necessary,” she said.
Barber said his attorney explained that this was good news. All Barber cared about was not going to prison — and now, he understood, the prosecutor would not argue for this in front of the judge.
Anne was told she could write a statement asking for Barber to be sent to prison for the maximum amount of time. She didn’t know the prosecutor wasn’t planning to do the same.
So what’s the right punishment here?” asked Judge Jeffrey Sanford, according to a transcript of the sentencing.
He looked down at Anne. She’d worn a beige cardigan and no makeup. He looked at Barber, whose attorney had argued that Barber’s behavior had been a “lapse of judgment” from an “otherwise excellent police officer.”
His lawyer noted that incarceration would be a significant hardship to Barber’s wife and four kids and recommended probation with some time to be served on home detention.
Barber was still on unpaid leave from the South Bend Police Department. Despite all the complaints from other young women that surfaced during the investigation, the department had not terminated him.
The prosecutors hadn’t asked Yoder — or any other witnesses — to testify at the sentencing and detail what Barber had done to Anne. Again, Soto said, she didn’t think it was necessary.
“Now, if I send you to the DOC,” Sanford said to Barber, referring to the Indiana Department of Correction, “you’ll be in isolation probably because you’d be in danger. You’d be in danger the whole time you were there. You might not even make it out of prison.”
Before being appointed to the bench in 2016, Sanford — who did not respond to questions about the case — had represented South Bend as a deputy city attorney. He defended police officers accused of misconduct, including a case of sexual assault.
Soto did not raise the judge’s history as a potential conflict of interest. She said she’d tried that once before in a different sexual misconduct case, when a former assistant Notre Dame basketball coach had been accused of taking naked photos of a woman without her consent.
During the hearing, Sanford allegedly laughed and made inappropriate comments about the woman and photographic evidence in the case, according to a local media report — a characterization the judge denied in an exchange with prosecutors at the time.
Afterward, the woman refused to testify because she felt “degraded,” and Soto asked the judge to recuse himself.
But he refused and, at one point, threatened to hold prosecutors in contempt of court. All the charges against the former basketball coach were eventually dropped.
Now Sanford wondered out loud what would have happened if, instead of being accused, Barber had been the one investigating the crime. Would Barber be arguing for that cop to do prison time?
“You probably would be,” Sanford told the officer. “I don’t think anybody in this courtroom would blame me for sentencing you to four years in prison. ... well, maybe your family would, but the victim probably wouldn’t, and that’s what she wants to see.”
Then the judge announced his decision.
“I’m not going to send you to prison,” Sanford said.
Barber’s sentence, the judge ruled, would be suspended entirely — with no time at all on home detention. He’d be on the sex offender registry for 10 years and could continue to live at home while he was on probation.
“I’m giving you a break,” Sanford said to Barber.
“I understand,” Barber replied.
“And maybe you don’t deserve it,” the judge said. “I’m sure there’s people in this courtroom who think that you don’t.”
Anne poses for a portrait after the criminal case against Barber ended.
Detective Yoder shut his laptop. Because he hadn’t been called to testify against Barber, he’d been watching the hearing on a live stream.
When he’d spoken at the sentencing for the local softball coach a week earlier, that abuser was given 30 years in prison. Yoder had investigated this case just as aggressively, trying to show Anne and the community that it didn’t matter that Barber was a police officer.
Instead, when he next scrolled through Facebook, he saw comments asking why police officers like Barber get special treatment.
South Bend officials did not fire Barber after he was found guilty, as the police department had promised on Facebook when Barber was arrested. Instead, Barber said, he got a call from the city telling him to resign or he’d have to go through an internal affairs investigation. So he resigned on his own. According to the Indiana Law Enforcement Academy, South Bend has not requested that Barber be stripped of his police certification.
The defense attorney who negotiated Barber’s plea deal followed the career path of Judge Sanford. Earlier this year, he was appointed to a judgeship in the same courthouse — and Soto, the deputy prosecutor, was assigned to his courtroom.
Days after the sentencing hearing, Barber got the GPS ankle monitor removed that he’d been wearing since his arrest. He bought a new pair of tan work boots, he said, to replace the ones he had cut a hole to fit the monitoring device. Then, he took his kids for ice cream.
These days, Barber spends most of his free time at church or home, raising chickens and honeybees with his family. He said his relationship with his wife and kids has never been stronger.
“This has been good for me. I know that people don’t want to hear that. They want to know that I’m going through pain or torture probably. ... But I’m very happy and I’m very fortunate.”
When asked what he would have done differently, Barber said: “I probably wouldn’t have become a police officer.”
Anne, meanwhile, had informed her parents that she no longer wants to go into policing. She enrolled at a state university and chose classes that would help her get into law school. She imagined herself working with victims. She would never tell them they would get eaten alive.
Her own attorney, Charlie Rice, explained to her that just because the state criminal case was over didn’t mean she had to give up.
She filed a civil lawsuit against Barber and the city of South Bend, claiming they should be held liable for what happened to her in Barber’s patrol car. The case could take years to resolve.
Rice is also seeking a federal criminal investigation into Barber’s conduct, according to a letter he sent in March to the Justice Department. If the agency agrees, Barber could be prosecuted on federal charges and again face the possibility of being sent to prison.
Anne tried to go whole days without thinking of it all. She attended football games and country music concerts. She studied for her criminal justice classes. She confided in a counselor about her nightmares.
Anne celebrates her high school graduation in June 2023.
Then on a Monday in March, she got a call from her mom: Another of South Bend’s roughly 250 officers had been arrested.
Officer Rico Butler was accused of sexually abusing a minor. Again, the charge was child seduction. Again, the alleged victim was a teenage girl. Butler, who did not respond to messages seeking comment, would later enter a not guilty plea at his arraignment.
As Anne read the charging documents posted by a local news site, she saw a familiar name listed as the detective assigned to the case.
Jon Yoder’s commander had called him on a Friday afternoon.
“Here we go again,” Yoder thought.
By that night, Yoder had the 27-year-old officer in an interview room, questioning him about what he had done with the 17-year-old girl. Within hours, the detective said, Butler had confessed.
Yoder worked until 3 a.m., making sure he’d documented every detail. He still wanted to believe that the evidence mattered. That cops would be held accountable. As he drove home, he wondered if this time, it would be true.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2024/south-bend-police-child-sexual-abuse-punishment/?itid=hp-foryou-readinghistory_p004_f014
