A Cowlitz County court official who has overseen its juvenile detention center is facing charges that he raped a 9-year-old female family member on two separate occasions more than a decade ago.
Chadwick Michael Connors, 41, allegedly assaulted the family member between 2009 and 2011 while she was asleep, according to charging documents filed this week in Cowlitz County Superior Court.
The family member, now 21 years old, filed a report in February.
Because Connors is a Cowlitz County employee, Cowlitz County officials called upon the Clark County Sheriff’s Office to investigate the allegations. Once the investigation finished, it was forwarded to the Lewis County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office.
Lewis County Prosecuting Attorney Jonathan Meyer filed the charges against Connors on Thursday.
“Even though this all centers around Cowlitz County, it’s going to end up being handled by basically nobody in Cowlitz County,” Meyer said in a brief interview Friday.
Connors faces two counts of first-degree rape of a child and two counts of first-degree incest. The charges were first reported by The Daily News in Longview.
Connors is an administrator at Cowlitz County Superior Court. In 2009, he began overseeing the Cowlitz County Youth Services Center, a youth detention facility that serves children from Cowlitz, Lewis and other neighboring counties.
Cowlitz County Risk Manager Nicole Tideman told OPB in an email that Connors’ alleged crimes are not connected to his work. Tideman did not answer questions about whether Connors remains employed at the county or whether any other employees have recently been placed on leave.
According to an internal email obtained by OPB, Cowlitz County Superior Court Judge Gary Bashor had placed Connors on leave by Feb. 16. Bashor noted the court “affords all of our employees confidentiality.”
The youth center has been a prominent issue in Cowlitz County. The facility was one of the few in the country to hold a contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain undocumented teens. Cowlitz County ended that contract in February 2021 amid mounting pressure.
Angelina Godoy, director of the University of Washington’s Center for Human Rights, routinely called upon the county to end the contract. Reached Friday, she said she was worried by the allegations.
“I think it’s reasonable to express deep concern about the well-being of all those kids who passed through that facility, whether they are local kids who passed through that jail… as well as kids who are not U.S. citizens,” Godoy said.
According to the court documents, Connors’ ex-wife confronted him when she first learned of the allegations when the victim was still a teenager.
“She confronted Connors about the allegations and she reported that his first response was ‘they can’t prove it,’” the court documents said. “He followed up by denying that he would do such a thing.”