A member of Wichita State’s Final Four team is being investigated for a sexual assault that allegedly occurred over the weekend.

According to the Wichita Police Department, officers are investigating a sexual assault that involves a now-former basketball player. The alleged crime reportedly happened off-campus at a current player’s home sometime between Saturday night and Sunday morning.

Police said others were at the home at the time, but that no other players, current or former, are under investigation.

The alleged victim is a 20-year-old woman, but she is not a Wichita State student. A police report states the 20-year-old woke up while the assault was happening. She went to a hospital where lab tests were conducted.

No arrests have been made.

Wichita State Athletic Director Eric Sexton released the following statement;

“Wichita State University has been informed of the police investigation. We are mindful and respectful of all parties involved. Wichita State University and the Athletic Department take this situation very seriously, and are cooperating with the Wichita Police Department. At this time it is important to let the investigative process take its course.”

“The University will have no further comment regarding this matter at this time.”

See video at KAKE

KAKE News

Former Garden Plain football coach Todd Puetz, who was facing a possible sentence of five years in prison for electronic solicitation of a minor, has avoided jail time by reaching a plea agreement with prosecutors.

Puetz pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of patronizing a prostitute and was given a 30-day suspended sentence by District Judge Ben Burgess. Puetz was not required to appear in court when Burgess signed the agreement on Friday.

Puetz was one of seven men arrested in October 2011 during a Wichita police sting that targeted men willing to pay to have sex with underage girls.

A Sedgwick County jury found Puetz not guilty in April of attempted aggravated indecent liberties with a child and attempted criminal sodomy. But the jury was unable to reach a verdict on the third and most serious count: electronic solicitation of a child under 16. Puetz faced a possible sentence of 55 to 61 months in prison on that charge.

During the trial, the jury heard recordings of several calls Puetz made to a phone being answered by an undercover police detective posing as a 15-year-old prostitute. Puetz testified that he innocently called the number looking for a massage after seeing an ad that the detective had placed on the backpage.com Internet website.

Burgess, the trial judge, declared a mistrial on the third count, and the case was placed back on the jury trial docket. The retrial was scheduled to begin June 24.

When asked why the agreement was reached, District Attorney Marc Bennett issued a statement through a spokesman that said, “After a lengthy discussion with law enforcement and careful consideration, the parties arrived at this appropriate resolution.”

Defense lawyer Dan Monnat said he was limited in what he could say about the case.

“After a great deal of consideration, all parties agree this is an appropriate resolution,” he said. “We are grateful to the Sedgwick County district attorney and the jury for permitting this resolution of the case.”

Of the seven men charged in the sting operation, it appears that only one will face prison time. The case against one of the seven was dismissed by prosecutors and another suspect was found not guilty by a jury. Puetz and three other defendants accepted plea agreements that allowed them to plead guilty to misdemeanor charges and avoid prison time. The seventh defendant pleaded guilty to a felony and is awaiting sentencing. That final plea agreement also involved an unrelated case that accused the defendant of soliciting sex from a child under 14 through an Internet chat room.

By Hurst Laviana

A Sedgwick County jury has found a former high school football coach not guilty on two of the three counts against him.

The jury says it is at an impasse on a third count.

The jury found Todd Puetz not guilty on charges of attempted aggravated indecent liberties and attempted criminal sodomy.

The jury could not reach a decision on a charge of electronic solicitation.

Puetz was accused of soliciting sex from an undercover detective posing as a 15 year old girl.

“The greatest gift that we can give each other as human beings is understanding.  Todd Puetz and his family are very grateful to these courageous jurors for their understanding,” says his attorney Dan Monnat with Monnat and Spurrier.

Puetz was the football coach at Garden Plain High School.

The jury began deliberations Friday.

The prosecution can still decide to retry him on the charge of electronic solicitation on which the jury could not decide.

See video at KWCH

KWCH TV – By Roger Cornish & Michael Schwanke

A Sedgwick County jury acquitted former Garden Plain football coach Todd Puetz of two felony charges Monday but was unable to reach a verdict on the third and most serious count.

After for than a full day of deliberations, the jury found Puetz not guilty of attempted aggravated indecent liberties with a child and attempted criminal sodomy. The jury said it was deadlocked on a charge of electronic solicitation of a child.

If retried and convicted on the solicitation charge, Puetz would face a sentence of 55 to 61 months in prison. He would have qualified for probation had he been convicted of either of the other two charges.

Lawyers on both sides were reluctant to discuss the case because on of the charges is still pending. A dozen of Puetz’s relatives attended the trial, and one or two of them cried quietly after the jury’s decision was announced.

The charges grew out of an undercover police sting operation in October 2011 that targeted men willing to pay for sex with underage girls.

During the trial, the jury heard recordings of several calls Puetz made to a phone being answered by an undercover police detective posing as a 15-year-old prostitute. Puetz testified that he innocently called the number looking for a massage after seeing an ad that the detective had placed on the backpage.com Internet website.

During the 3 ½ days of testimony last week, the jury heard a prosecution case that was based largely on the testimony of Detective Jennifer Wright, the detective who posed as the girl. Although the ad carried a note that said the poster was 18, Wright said she told Puetz in the first call that she was 15.

Over a two hour period on the night of Oct. 22, 2011, the jury was told, Puetz and Wright exchanged nine calls or voice mail messages before Puetz arrived at a pink house in the 15100 block of West Kellogg where police were conducting the sting.

Puetz testified that he innocently called the number after finding it on backpage.com while looking for a place to get a massage. He testified that he had no intention of having sex with underage girl. Less than an hour before his arrest, he testified, he had sex with an adult woman who also had advertised her services on the backpage.com website.

The defense called nearly a dozen character witnesses who said Puetz’s character was beyond reproach and that he had never showed any unhealthy interest in underage girls.

Shortly before reaching its verdict, the jury asked for a read-back of testimony Wright gave about the third of the nine telephone exchanges between Wright and Puetz. In that call, Wright called Puetz as she tried to give him directions to the house where he was eventually arrested.

District Judge Ben Burgess gave the jurors an entrapment instruction that said they should find the defendant not guilty if he was induced by police to commit a crime he had no predisposition of committing. Entrapment is not a defense, the instruction said, in a case where a defendant was predisposed to committing a crime and police only offered him an opportunity to do so.

Read Article at Kansas.com

The Wichita Eagle  – By Hurst Laviana


An article by Dan Monnat and Paige Nichols has been cited in a new opinion by the Kansas Supreme Court.

Justice Lee A. Johnson, writing for the Court in State of Kansas v. Lawson, referred to Monnat and Nichols’ work in The Loneliness of the Kansas Constitution, published in September 2010 by the Journal of the Kansas Association for Justice, while discussing the Kansas Supreme Court’s authority to construe the Kansas constitution as more protective of individual rights than the federal constitution.

“I am pleased and honored that our article appears to have assisted the Court in its consideration of this important constitutional issue, and hope that our work will continue to be useful to the Court in the future,” said Monnat.

WICHITA, Kansas — A Sedgwick County jury acquitted a former Garden Plain football coach of two charges involving sex with children but could not reach a verdict on a third count.

The jury on Monday found Todd Puetz not guilty of attempted aggravated indecent liberties with a child and attempted criminal sodomy. The jury deadlocked on a charge of electronic solicitation of a child.

Puetz was one of seven men arrested after a police sting operation in October 2011. He was accused of trying to meet a person he thought was a 15-year-old girl for sex after communicating with her online.

His attorneys argued Puetz was entrapped by an undercover agent and he didn’t solicit anyone.

Prosecutors did not say if they intend to retry Puetz on the solicitation charge.

See video at KSN

KSNW TV

Todd Puetz, the Garden Plain Football Coach caught in a sex crime sting in October of 2011, has been found not guilty on two counts of attempted sex acts.

Jurors were unable to reach a verdict on the third count of electronic solicitation of a child.

Puetz was accused of trying to meet who he thought was an underage girl he had been communicating with online.  He was one of seven men arrested in the online sting operation where an officer posed as a young girl and lured them to a Wichita address where they were arrested.

The Exploited and Missing Child Unit arrested Puetz when he went to an address that was mentioned during a phone call with the police decoy.

The trial began early last week and the jury began deliberating on Friday.

Puetz was the second defendant in the sting operation to go to trial.  The first defendant, Kyle Miller was found not guilty by a Sedgwick County jury in early March.

See video at KAKE

KAKE TV

A Sedgwick County jury began deliberations Friday in the trial of former Garden Plain football coach Todd Puetz.

After 31/2 days of testimony, the jury deliberated for just over two hours before adjourning for the weekend.

Among the evidence sent to the jury room are audio recordings of several calls that Puetz made to a telephone that was being answered by an undercover police detective posing as a 15-year-old runaway prostitute.

Puetz is charged with felony counts of electronic solicitation of a child, attempted aggravated indecent liberties with a child and attempted criminal sodomy. The charges grew out of an undercover police sting operation that targeted men willing to pay for sex with underage girls.

The operation was conducted in a house in the 15100 block of West Kellogg after a detective posing as a girl named Rissa placed an ad in the escorts section of the backpage.com website in October 2011. Puetz was one of seven men who answered the ad and were arrested in the sting.

District Judge Ben Burgess included an entrapment instruction in the information he sent to the jury room. The instruction said a defendant should be found not guilty if he was induced by police to commit a crime he had no predisposition of committing.

Entrapment is not a defense, the instruction said, in a case where a defendant was predisposed to committing a crime and police only offered him an opportunity to do so.

The ad placed by the detective included a notice that said the poster was 18 years old, but the detective told Puetz on his first call that she was only 15.

“That’s pretty young,” Puetz is heard saying on the tape.

“Well, it’s not like I’m 5,” the detective told him.

“Where are you located at?” Puetz asked.

In his closing argument, prosecutor Jason Edwards discounted Puetz’s claim that he suspected all along that the person claiming to be a teenage runaway was really a police officer.

“Either that’s a 15-year-old girl or a cop pretending to be a 15-year-old girl,” Edwards said. “Either way, why would you consider having conversation? But he does.”

Assistant District Attorney Shannon Wilson, who helped prosecute the case, told the jury that the sting operation was a good-faith attempt by police to take a proactive approach to combating the sexual exploitation of underage girls.

“You know there is a seedy underworld in our community,” she told the jury. “You also know that Todd Puetz chose to be part of that underworld.”

Wilson asked the jury not to seriously consider an entrapment defense.

“They did not go looking for him,” she said. “He called them. If he doesn’t call them, we are not here today.”

In his closing argument, defense lawyer Dan Monnat argued that the sting operation was a trap that ensnared anyone who happened to wander into it.

He reminded the jury of 10 character witnesses who testified that Puetz’s character and reputation were beyond question. Several said Puetz has often been around teenage girls and was never suspected of having improper feelings for them.

Monnat told the jury that before he was arrested, police had never considered Puetz to be a potential child sex molester. Despite all the publicity surrounding the case, Monnat said, no teenage girls have come forward to say that Puetz behaved improperly around them.

“Did any real 15-year-old teenager or child come forward to say that Todd had ever done anything like this before?” he asked.

Monnat said entrapment was a legitimate defense in this case.

“He had no previous disposition to be interested in 15-year-olds,” he said.

Deliberations are scheduled to resume Monday.

Read Article at Kansas.com

Kansas.com – By Hurst Laviana

Former Garden Plain football coach Todd Puetz told a Sedgwick County jury Wednesday that he wasn’t looking for sex when he went to a house where undercover police officers were posing as underage prostitutes.

“I was going there to try to help them out,” he told the jury. “I would’ve given them the money I had, and I would have called police.”

Puetz was one of seven men arrested in October 2011 during a police sting operation that targeted men willing to pay to have sex with underage girls.

He is charged with felony counts of electronic solicitation of a child, attempted aggravated indecent liberties with a child and attempted criminal sodomy.

“Did you electronically solicit anyone you believed to be less than 16 years of age?” defense lawyer Dan Monnat asked.

“No,” Puetz replied.

“Did you attempt to take indecent liberties or commit sodomy with anyone you believed to be under 16 years of age?”

“No.”

The state’s case against Puetz was based primarily on the testimony of Wichita police Detective Jennifer Wright, who posed as a 15-year-old girl during the operation.

She told the jury that Puetz replied to an ad she placed in the escort section of the backpage.com Internet website. After a series of phone calls, she testified, Puetz was arrested on Oct. 22, 2011, after he arrived at a house in the 15100 block of West Kellogg where the sting operation was being conducted.

Puetz told the jury that he turned to massage therapy to alleviate anxieties that were caused in part by being the coach of a winning football program that won a state title in 2007.

On the day of his arrest, he said, he drove to Lyons for a volleyball tournament and stopped at a junior college football game in Hutchinson on the way back. He said his wife and most of their seven children were attending a wedding in El Dorado that day.

Puetz said he turned to backpage.com when he got home that night to find someone who could give him a massage. He told Monnat that he called several numbers listed in ads. He said there was nothing special in the ad placed by Wright.

“It was just the next one in line,” he said.

The trial is being held in the courtroom of District Judge Ben Burgess.

A juror in the case was allowed to remain on the jury panel Wednesday despite the fact that a nephew of his was arrested this week in Indiana under circumstances similar to those faced by Puetz.

The juror said he learned Tuesday night that a nephew who works as a teacher and basketball coach in Indiana was arrested Monday night on indecent liberties charges.

Burgess ruled that the juror could remain on the case after he assured Burgess and lawyers on both sides that the arrest would not influence his decision in the trial.

“I don’t think that it’ll affect my decision at all,” he said outside the presence of the other jurors. “I just thought you should know.”

Of the seven men arrested in the sting, prosecutors dismissed charges against one, and another was found not guilty by a jury. Four of the defendants are awaiting trial.

Read Article at Kansas.com

The Wichita Eagle – By Hurst Laviana

Former Garden Plain football coach Todd Puetz was not trying to solicit sex from a 15-year-old girl when he was arrested in 2011 but was instead trying to help two young runaways who said they needed money, a defense lawyer told a jury Tuesday.

“Todd only intended to help them by giving them what money he had,” Dan Monnat told the jury. “The evidence will show that Todd is a flawed human being, but he is not a flawed human being who is guilty of the child sex crimes he’s accused of here today. Todd Puetz never had any interest in underage girls.”

Monnat’s comments came during the opening statement at Puetz’s trial on charges of electronic solicitation, attempted aggravated indecent liberties with a child and attempted criminal sodomy.

Prosecutors said Puetz was one of seven men arrested in October 2011 during a police sting operation that targeted men willing to pay to have sex with underage girls.

Assistant District Attorney Shannon Wilson told the jury in her opening statement that the operation was set up by the Wichita-Sedgwick County Exploited and Missing Child Unit to combat child sex trafficking.

Investigators set up in a government-owned house in the 15100 block of West Kellogg and placed an ad in the escort section of the backpage.com Internet website. The operation was conducted on Oct. 21 and Oct. 22, 2011.

“They were not prepared for the response they got,” Wilson said. “They were overwhelmed.”

Puetz called the number at 8:06 p.m. on Oct. 22 and was arrested shortly before 10 p.m. when he showed up at the house after several other phone calls, Wilson said.

She offered a synopsis of the first conversation between Puetz and undercover Wichita police Detective Jennifer Wright, who was posing as a 15-year-old girl.

Puetz: “How much for an hour?”

Wright: “$120.”

Puetz: “Are you 18?”

Wright: “I’m 15.”

Puetz: “That’s pretty young.”

Wright: “Well, it’s not like I’m 5.”

Puetz: “You’re not a cop are you?”

Wright: “No I am not a cop.”

Monnat told the jury that Puetz began suffering from depression, anxiety and panic attacks after his father died in 2008. He ended up taking two prescription drugs, Monnat said, but was worried about becoming over dependent on the medication. Puetz eventually turned to massage therapy to ease his anxieties, Monnat said.

Shorty before his arrest, Monnat said, Garden Plain lost its first football game of the season, and Puetz was afraid that another loss would keep the team out of the state playoffs. Puetz was worried that that could cost him his job, Monnat said.

Monnat said that by this time, Puetz had learned that some massage therapists in Wichita offered sexual favors for an additional cost. He said Puetz occasionally took advantage of those offers. On the night of his arrest, Monnat said, Puetz had a sexual encounter with such a therapist who claimed to be 24 but was probably around 30.

“Todd Puetz never had any interest in underage girls,” Monnat said. “Todd Puetz is guilty of being unfaithful to his family. Todd Puetz is not guilty of the sex crimes he’s accused of in this case”.

The trial is being held in the courtroom of District Judge Ben Burgess and is expected to last about a week.

Read Article at Kansas.com

The Wichita Eagle – By Hurst Laviana