Deputy won’t be charged

The Idaho attorney general’s office on Thursday said there isn’t evidence to file rape charges against a Kootenai County sheriff’s deputy who was fired for having sex while on duty.

The female who initially alleged she was raped by Deputy Jeremy Young later said she did not believe she had been raped but that she had been “taken advantage of” due to her intoxicated condition, the report stated.

Young was fired Oct. 31 after the woman alleged he gave her a ride home from a Bayview bar in his patrol car and the two had sex. The Sheriff’s Department asked the Idaho State Police to investigate the rape allegations.

After Young left the woman’s home in the early morning hours Oct. 26, the woman went to a neighbor’s home in Bayview, called a friend who is a Coeur d’Alene police officer and said the deputy had raped her, according to the attorney general’s report.

The neighbor previously told The Spokesman-Review that the woman showed up at her house around 3 a.m. “She was just crying,” said the neighbor, who asked not to be named. “She said she’d been raped by a police officer.”

Young, who worked more than four years as a deputy, told investigators he had sex with the woman while he was on duty, but he adamantly denied raping her, the report said.

Young could not be reached for comment Thursday.

The woman was at The Captain’s Wheel bar in Bayview the night of the incident, the report said. Young came into the bar around 1:30 a.m., according to the report, to do a “bar check,” according to the report.

Sheriff Rocky Watson said deputies often do such checks to make sure bars are in compliance with liquor laws, are not serving minors and are not overserving customers.

According to the report released Thursday, the woman and Young began talking and realized they had attended high school together. Young reportedly left the bar but returned a short time later.

He asked patrons drinking at the bar if they had rides home, at which point the woman asked if Young could drive her home, the report said.

The woman told investigators Young kissed her inside the patrol car while it was parked in front of her house, then the two went inside. She told investigators they kissed and she reciprocated the kiss, according to the report.

In declining to prosecute Young, the attorney general’s office cited the woman’s statement that she thought she told Young “to stop” during sex, but she couldn’t remember having said the word “no.”

The report said she told her friend a slightly different account of the night’s events, saying she was “raped,” but when asked if the sex was consensual, responded, “I guess.”

In interviews with the woman, investigators learned that she went to the laundry room and grabbed a sheet and duvet cover to put on the bed before the two had sex. She also provided a condom.

Though the woman said she was intoxicated, the attorney general’s office said she was able to tell investigators “in a fair amount of detail” what had happened that night.

The report said there was no evidence that Young threatened the woman or used “his status as a law enforcement officer to overcome resistance.”

According to Sheriff’s Department policies, employees are prohibited from having sex while on duty.

The attorney general’s report said the Coeur d’Alene officer contacted by the woman reported the incident to the Sheriff’s Department. Watson said an internal investigation was launched immediately and completed in just over a day. Then the state police investigated.

Watson declined to comment on the incident involving Young, but he said such situations don’t “come up often.”

“The last time we had an incident like this was 1977,” he said.