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Officers deny extorting contractor accused of sexually assaulting women for years
A federal lawsuit claims police officers took thousands of dollars from a businessman in their Tennessee city in exchange for obstructing efforts to investigate allegations that he was sexually assaulting multiple women for years. The police department has denied any wrongdoing.
The extortion claim involving several Johnson City police officers appears in court filings from a federal lawsuit accusing building contractor Sean Williams – who is now in custody on state and federal criminal charges – of drugging and raping women in the East Tennessee community from 2018 to 2021 while police did little to investigate him.
There was “either an implied or explicit agreement” that the officers would shield Williams, “permitting him to continue his criminal activities of abuse and trafficking with impunity,” say lawyers for nine women, listed as Jane Does 1-9, who are suing the city.
These plaintiffs raised the extortion claims months ago, but their May 14 filing makes the claims more explicit by alleging that bank documents back the assertions. The same lawyers also revealed, in April, that they have provided hundreds of pages of information for a federal public corruption investigation of the police department.
Williams awaits trial on state charges including child rape, aggravated sexual battery and especially aggravated sexual exploitation, and federal charges including three counts of production of child sexual abuse material and one count of distribution of cocaine. He’s also charged with escape, after authorities said he kicked the window out of a federal transport van and was caught in Florida more than a month later.
The law firm representing Williams didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment emailed by The Associated Press.
Erick Herrin, an attorney for the city and multiple officers who were sued, said all the defendants deny the allegations, but court rules limit what else he can say. In a statement, the city said it would welcome an investigation.
“There has been no evidence presented to support allegations of corruption by the Johnson City Police Department, and we welcome any investigation that could dispel such claims,” the city said.
Allegations spelled out
The May 14 filing claims Williams’ business partner, referred to as Female 4, opened shell companies disguised as subcontractors and transferred thousands of dollars from Williams’ business, Glass and Concrete Contracting LLC. The money was laundered so she could take “owner draws” to pay $2,000 a week to some Johnson City Police officers who had also seized cash from Williams’ safe, the document alleges.
The plaintiffs point to bank records, saying that for instance, during a two-week period in June 2022, Female 4 withdrew nearly $30,000 in cash from the company’s account. They say the woman appears to have withdrawn no more than $10,000 per day, “likely in an effort to evade mandatory (reporting of) suspicious activity.”
In a filing in March, the plaintiffs said Williams himself described the extortion in a message from jail in September 2023. They say he used a contraband cellphone to send the messages to a coconspirator who then posted them on Facebook. One mentioned weekly payments of $2,000 to officers using fraudulent 1099 tax documents and “forged owner draws.”
In a court filing in response, Female 4’s attorney said her communications with Williams have been infrequent since their personal relationship ended in 2017. The filing says the Facebook post was made by “someone using the name of Sean Williams” and says she has no relevant knowledge about the allegations and doesn’t have any relevant documents.
The attorney for Female 4 did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.
The local district attorney, who is prosecuting Tennessee’s charges against Williams, declined to comment on the extortion accusations, citing an ongoing investigation, and didn’t specify whether they’re looking into extortion claims.
One purported victim fell from a fifth story window
The lawsuits say Williams’ crimes continued even after Jane Doe 1 survived a fall from the window of his fifth story apartment in September 2020. Officers investigating the fall found ample evidence of sexual assaults in his apartment, including a list of names labeled “Raped.” Even when that woman went public, Williams’ identity was protected as “Robert Voe.”
Kateri Lynne Dahl, a former special prosecutor in the East Tennessee U.S. attorney’s office, was brought in as a liaison with city authorities. She also filed a federal lawsuit against the city. She says she gathered substantial evidence that Williams had been dealing drugs and was credibly accused of sexually assaulting and raping multiple women, but police refused to investigate further and botched her effort to arrest him on an April 2021 federal felon-possessing-ammunition charge, letting him flee.
The city rebutted Dahl’s claims in a statement that pointed to prosecutorial delays.
Williams wasn’t arrested until April 2023, when a campus police officer in North Carolina found him asleep in his car and learned of the federal warrant. An affidavit says a search of the car found – along with drugs and about $100,000 in cash – digital storage devices with more than 5,000 images of child sexual abuse as well as photos and videos of 52 female victims being sexually assaulted by Williams at his Johnson City apartment while they were in an “obvious state of unconsciousness.”
Many of the videos were stored in labeled folders, and at least a half-dozen names on the folders were consistent with first names on the “Raped” list found in his apartment two and a half years earlier, the affidavit states.
Meanwhile, public outcry over the police response to complaints from a growing number of women prompted the city in the summer of 2022 to order an outside investigation into how officers handled sexual assault investigations. And in November 2022, the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation opened a federal sex trafficking investigation.
Findings from the city’s third-party audit, released in 2023, include that police conducted inconsistent, ineffective and incomplete investigations; relied on inadequate record management; had insufficient training and policies, and sometimes showed issues with gender-based stereotypes and bias.
The city said it began improving the department’s performance while awaiting the audit’s findings, including following the district attorney’s new sexual assault investigation protocol; reviewing investigative policies and procedures; creating a “comfortable space” for victim interviews and increasing funding for officer training and a new records management system.
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A long-running heat wave that has already shattered previous records across the U.S. persisted on Sunday, baking parts of the West with dangerous temperatures that caused the death of a motorcyclist in Death Valley and held the East in its hot and humid grip.
An excessive heat warning — the National Weather Service’s highest alert — was in effect for about 36 million people, or about 10% of the population, said NWS meteorologist Bryan Jackson. Dozens of locations in the West and Pacific Northwest tied or broke previous heat records.
Many areas in Northern California surpassed 110 degrees, with the city of Redding topping out at a record 119. Phoenix set a new daily record Sunday for the warmest low temperature: it never got below 92 F.
A high temperature of 128 F was recorded Saturday and Sunday at Death Valley National Park in eastern California, where a visitor died Saturday from heat exposure and another person was hospitalized, officials said.
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The two visitors were part of a group of six motorcyclists riding through the Badwater Basin area amid scorching weather, the park said in a statement.
The person who died was not identified. The other motorcyclist was transported to a Las Vegas hospital for “severe heat illness,” the statement said. Due to the high temperatures, emergency medical helicopters were unable to respond, as the aircraft cannot generally fly safely over 120 F, officials said.
The other four members of the party were treated at the scene.
“While this is a very exciting time to experience potential world record-setting temperatures in Death Valley, we encourage visitors to choose their activities carefully, avoiding prolonged periods of time outside of an air-conditioned vehicle or building when temperatures are this high,” said park Superintendent Mike Reynolds.
Officials warned that heat illness and injury are cumulative and can build over the course of a day or days.
“Besides not being able to cool down while riding due to high ambient air temperatures, experiencing Death Valley by motorcycle when it is this hot is further challenged by the necessary heavy safety gear worn to reduce injuries during an accident,” the park statement said.
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The soaring temperatures didn’t faze Chris Kinsel, a Death Valley visitor who said it was “like Christmas day for me” to be there on a record-breaking day. Kinsel said he and his wife typically come to the park during the winter, when it’s still plenty warm — but that’s nothing compared with being at one of the hottest places on Earth in July.
“Death Valley during the summer has always been a bucket list thing for me. For most of my life, I’ve wanted to come out here in summertime,” said Kinsel, who was visiting Death Valley’s Badwater Basin area from Las Vegas.
Kinsel said he planned to go to the park’s visitor center to have his photo taken next to the digital sign displaying the current temperature.
Across the desert in Nevada, Natasha Ivory took four of her eight children to a water park in Mount Charleston, outside Las Vegas, which on Sunday set a record high of 120 F.
“They’re having a ball,” Ivory told Fox5 Vegas said. “I’m going to get wet too. It’s too hot not to.”
Jill Workman Anderson also was at Mount Charleston, taking her dog for a short hike and enjoying the view.
“We can look out and see the desert,” she said. “It was also 30 degrees cooler than northwest Las Vegas, where we live.”
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Triple-digit temperatures were common across Oregon, where several records were toppled — including in Salem, where on Sunday it hit 103 F, topping the 99 F mark set in 1960. On the more humid East Coast, temperatures above 100 degrees were widespread, though no excessive heat advisories were in effect for Sunday.
“Drink plenty of fluids, stay in an air-conditioned room, stay out of the sun, and check up on relatives and neighbors,” read a weather service advisory for the Baltimore area. “Young children and pets should never be left unattended in vehicles under any circumstances.”
Rare heat advisories were extended even into higher elevations including around Lake Tahoe, on the border of California and Nevada, with the weather service in Reno, Nevada, warning of “major heat risk impacts, even in the mountains.”
“How hot are we talking? Well, high temperatures across (western Nevada and northeastern California) won’t get below 100 degrees until next weekend,” the service posted online. “And unfortunately, there won’t be much relief overnight either.”
More extreme highs are in the near forecast, including possibly 130 F around midweek at Furnace Creek, California, in Death Valley. The hottest temperature ever officially recorded on Earth was 134 F in July 1913 in Death Valley, though some experts dispute that measurement and say the real record was 130 F, recorded there in July 2021.
Tracy Housley, a native of Manchester, England, said she decided to drive from her hotel in Las Vegas to Death Valley after hearing on the radio that temperatures could approach record levels.
“We just thought, let’s be there for that,” Housley said Sunday. “Let’s go for the experience.”
In Arizona’s Maricopa County, which encompasses Phoenix, there have been at least 13 confirmed heat-related deaths this year, along with more than 160 other deaths suspected of being related to heat that are still under investigation, according to a recent report.
That does not include the death of a 10-year-old boy last week in Phoenix who suffered a “heat-related medical event” while hiking with family at South Mountain Park and Preserve, according to police.
In California, crews worked in sweltering conditions to battle a series of wildfires across the state.
In Santa Barbara County, northwest of Los Angeles, the growing Lake Fire had scorched more than 25 square miles of dry grass, brush and timber after breaking out Friday. There was no containment by Sunday. The blaze was burning through mostly uninhabited wildland, but some rural homes were under evacuation orders.
