Former Sunriver cop not guilty of criminal misconduct

Published 5:15 pm Friday, September 4, 2020

The lawyer for Kasey Samuel Hughes, the former Sunriver Police officer found not guilty of official misconduct Thursday in Deschutes County Circuit Court, said the district attorney emphasized salacious details at the expense of innocent people.

Hughes’ lawyer said he’s upset with how District Attorney John Hummel chose to publicize the case, using details like the fact Hughes’ wife is a fellow police officer and that he’d been cheating on her.

“I don’t have much respect for that,” said attorney Jaime Goldberg after a judge found his client not guilty of two counts of misdemeanor official misconduct. “I think district attorneys should not be political, and trotting this out in the news media because it involved a sexual affair I think is very irresponsible, and it hurt a lot of people. This hurt the defendant, and it hurt a sex abuse victim. For what good reason?”

Hummel did not respond to a request for comment.

Late Thursday evening, after a two-day trial, Judge Walter Miller ruled the evidence showed Hughes acted out of concern on Nov. 11, 2018, when he drove to Bend to be with a woman who had called him to say she’d been raped.

The state had alleged Hughes made the late-night trip to conceal his affair with the woman and, in doing so, had “abandoned his post” in Sunriver, endangering its residents. The prosecution further claimed Hughes, as an officer, should have immediately begun an investigation into the woman’s claims and reported it to the Bend Police Department.

On the night he was accused of leaving his post, Hughes and his then-wife, Tiffany Hughes, were driving separate vehicles, the only officers patrolling the community of Sunriver. Her shift ended at 3 a.m., his at 6 a.m.

The couple testified their marriage was on shaky ground at the time. A month or two earlier, he’d begun an affair with a friend of Tiffany Hughes who worked locally as a 911 dispatcher.

On the night in question, the woman called him in a “highly” emotional and intoxicated state. She told him she needed him, but the reason wasn’t clear. She kept repeating, “I didn’t want it” and “I didn’t want that,” he told police.

Hughes elected to drive to Bend, and didn’t waste time. “I don’t want to say how fast I was going,” he said facetiously to a police interviewer.

Once he located the woman, she told him she’d been raped in the downtown parking garage, possibly by an Uber driver.

At St. Charles Bend, he asked a sexual assault nurse examiner to help him transport the woman inside, which required a wheelchair. “She was just gone,” he told police.

Inside the hospital, the woman told nurses she’d been raped but said not to call the police. Before he returned to Sunriver, Hughes left nurses his phone number and the phone number of the woman’s boyfriend — a trooper with Oregon State Police — and told the nurses to call Bend Police Department.

“I’m not here,” he said at one point.

Prosecutor Brooks McClain said the most damning statement against Hughes came from parking lot security guard Tyler Webber, who testified that he didn’t call police after Hughes arrived because he thought, “the police were already there.”

In the end, the judge wasn’t convinced, and in his decision, he cited two pieces of evidence submitted by the prosecution.

The first are the Sunriver Police Department’s guidelines for handling reports of sexual assault, which read that responding officers should show victims “compassion and consideration” and be “primarily concerned with (their) well-being.”

The other piece of evidence is the Oregon criminal justice code of ethics, which begins by stating an officer’s fundamental duty to “serve humankind; to safeguard lives and property.”

“The reasonable alternative theories supported by facts in evidence include that he was worried about her and wanted to respect her wishes to remain anonymous,” Miller said.

Five months after the incident, Sunriver Chief Cory Darling fired Hughes following an internal investigation that found he had violated 14 departmental policies.

If Hughes had been trying to conceal his affair on Nov. 11, 2018, it didn’t work, according to trial testimony. When he returned home from his shift at 6 a.m., he found his possessions strewn about outside the house, he told police.

Hughes, 41, now lives outside the Bend area. He remains certified as a police officer in Oregon, though Goldberg said his client isn’t sure if he’ll attempt to return to law enforcement.

Following the verdict, Hughes tearfully hugged his mother, who sat behind him in the courtroom, one of the only people in attendance, throughout the trial.

“That night, obviously, I was emotional,” Hughes said on the witness stand Thursday. “I wasn’t of clear mind. I did make mistakes. There were a lot of things going on in my mind that night.”