Police Shootings / Possible Abuse Threads [merged]

CHARLESTON, W. Va. — The jury had reached a verdict, and the former chief of police still seemed relaxed. He leaned back in his chair. He nodded to his supporters. He was facing up to life in prison, but during the four-day trial, he never looked rattled by the testimony against him.

His attorney had made his position clear: Chief Larry Clay Jr. wasn’t the type of guy to be involved in child sex trafficking.

Clay, the jury learned, was an HVAC tradesman who’d left his family business in his 40s to fulfill a lifelong ambition of becoming a law enforcement officer. He was a sheriff’s deputy in Fayette County, West Virginia, and also served as the police chief in one of its small towns: Gauley Bridge, population 550, a poor community nestled on a picturesque river. Clay was frequently the only man on duty, cruising the town’s hills with a gold badge on his chest.

“In Gauley Bridge,” prosecutors told the jury, “Larry Clay was the law.”

Clay was the law until one day in the fall of 2020, when a teenage girl made a startling report to the sheriff’s department. In the federal courtroom, she would be called by her initials, C.H.

C.H. was also known in Gauley Bridge. The town had watched her barefoot, blissful childhood come to an end when, at 13 years old, she learned the lump on her mother’s collarbone was a fast-growing lung cancer. Within a year, her mom was gone, leaving C.H. with her stepfather. He soon found a new wife, who moved into C.H.’s house.

The new stepmother and C.H. never got along. Shortly after C.H. graduated from high school, the teen left town and the only place she’d ever called home.

A few months later, Clay was stripped of his gold badge, and it wasn’t long before all of Gauley Bridge knew why.

C.H. had reported that her stepmother sold her to be raped for $100 when she was 17 years old. The buyer, she told the sheriff’s department, wasn’t just anyone — it was Police Chief Larry Clay. While he was in uniform and on duty. The first time, against his department-issued vehicle. The second, inside a police office..............

A police chief was accused of paying $100 to rape a teen — and trying to cover it up