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Former Connellsville cop’s second sexual assault trial started Monday

By Mark Hofmann mhofmann@heraldstandard.Com 5 min read
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The second of three trials against a former Connellsville police officer accused of sexual assault started on Monday with testimony from the alleged victim.

At the beginning of the trial for Ryan Reese, 44, Deputy Attorney General Patrick J. Schulte in his opening statement told the jury of 11 men and one woman that the normal idea of rape that many know involves someone physically holding someone else down with force.

“That’s not this case,” he said, adding that it was a case about Reese’s abuse of his authority as a police officer and member of the former Fayette County Drug Task Force. He used his job as a way to have sex with a woman that he filed drug charges against on three separate occasions.

Reese’s attorney, Charity Grimm Krupa, said Reese is innocent of every charge filed against him including rape, official oppression and three counts each of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, sexual assault and indecent assault.

Krupa said the alleged victim constantly called and texted Reese about what she could do about her charges. Krupa questioned why the alleged victim continued to go back to Reese two other times after their first sexual encounter.

“You have to keep asking yourself, ‘Does this sound like rape? Does this sound like sexual assault?'” Krupa told jurors.

The 35-year-old woman took the stand and testified that she became addicted to Oxycontin that she received from a fellow waitress when prescribed pain pills for her Fibromyalgia.

The Herald-Standard does not identify alleged victims of sexual assault.

Then, in January 2012, the same co-worker who was selling the pills to the woman asked her to sell pills to her. The alleged victim testified she did by getting some pills off a friend. When she went to sell them, the woman said, she was part of a bust by the drug task force as Reese took her into custody.

“I was scared to death,” the woman testified, adding that it felt like her whole world was falling apart when her vehicle was impounded and Reese told her she could face three to five years in prison if convicted. “I was so scared. I would have done anything he asked.”

The woman testified there was talk about her setting up drug deals, but having never been in trouble, she didn’t know anyone to set up and didn’t want to set up her friends that had pills because they had children. The woman testified she offered to pose as a prostitute either in person or online to help make arrests.

She testified when she contacted Reese to get items out of her impounded car, he told her to meet him at the drug task force building where she said he took her to the back office. While they were there, she testified, they talked about what she could do to get out of trouble.

“He then unzipped his pants and pulled out his penis,” she testified, adding he then told her to perform oral sex on him, which she did. “I felt pretty bad, I felt cheap.”

When finished, the woman asked Reese if that was it, but Reese said they needed to “hook up” a few more times.

The woman, a wife and mother of two, said she continued to feel bad about the encounter, but said she kept thinking it was better that going to prison.

In the second encounter when she was performing oral sex on Reese at the drug task force building, she testified she had trouble breathing as he was becoming more aggressive. She testified Reese told her to bend over a desk where he then had sexual intercourse with her.

When questioned by Schulte, the woman said she remembered details of the back office and the bathroom of the building including a poster with all types of different pills and a poster of the rapper Tupac Shakur.

During the third incident, the woman testified, Reese told her that he was on duty in Connellsville and instructed her to follow his police car when it passed the Sheetz. They went to an unknown location in Connellsville where she performed oral sex on him in the police vehicle, she told jurors.

“I never heard from him after that,” the woman said, adding that she never heard any more about her charges and even when she texted Reese about the charges, he never texted back.

The woman added that she never spoke to anyone about what happened except for a friend from whom she purchased pills and until the investigating state trooper for the case contacted her about it.

The woman testified she saved a couple of the text messages in case charges against her would have been filed, because she said she didn’t think anyone would believe her story.

Following Schulte’s examination of the woman around 3:40 p.m., Krupa said she believed her cross-examination would be lengthy, so Fayette County Judge Steve Leskinen excused the jury for the day to resume the trial on Tuesday.

Reese was convicted of corruption of minors in a second Fayette case for having sexual contact with a teenage girl who was working with him as a confidential informant in 2014. Jurors acquitted him of the more serious charge of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse in November.

Reese was sentenced to 9 to 24 months in prison, but is free on bond pending appeal to the state Superior Court.

Similar charges against Reese are pending trial in the Westmoreland County Court of Common Pleas.

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