A teenage girl came forward in May 2023 with a horrifying complaint: Her adoptive father had been raping her since 2021, she told police officers in an interview at her school. After some of the assaults, according to a police report, he would give her soda, candy or blueberry iced tea. The abuse started when she was 13.
The teen was removed from the home, and the case was assigned to Megan Morehouse, an investigator in the Yates County Sheriff’s Office who had met the girl at the school. For the department, in one of New York State’s smallest counties, the case was among the most serious of the year.
Investigator Morehouse did not believe the teen — she said as much in a conversation with a colleague that she accidentally recorded. She did not take basic investigative steps recommended by Todd Casella, the Yates County District Attorney, who consulted on the investigation. She did not obtain search warrants to access the father’s phone or to search the home, where a half dozen or so children lived. The teen said the abuse had occurred in a bedroom and the garage, among other places.
“What she didn’t do is the very essence of what it is to be a police officer,” Mr. Casella said. (Megan Morehouse did not respond to phone calls, emails, letters and home visits requesting comment for this article.)
Almost two months after the girl spoke out, the county’s Child Protective Services sent her back home, where she was “teased, yelled at, called a liar and blamed for breaking up the family,” according to a court filing.
And where she continued to endure sexual assaults.
When the teen came forward again, in November 2023, Mr. Casella asked that the case be turned over to the State Police. The father was charged with abusing the teen and two foster children. He pleaded guilty in September 2025 to a felony sexual assault charge involving a child, satisfying all the charges against him, Mr. Casella said.
Mr. Casella had filed a complaint, pushing for Investigator Morehouse’s dismissal. But she effectively got a slap on the wrist.
New York has no statewide standards for officer discipline, so any punishment was up to Frank Ryan, Investigator Morehouse’s former lieutenant, who in November 2023 was elected sheriff.
And Sheriff Ryan did not believe the investigative lapses warranted her termination, demotion or suspension. Finding that she had failed to give records to the district attorney, he landed on a punishment: He had her reread a five-page department policy about case sharing and issued a reprimand, writing, “It is my hope that this will instill on you, the importance of your reputation.”
Mr. Casella said that outcome fell short. “A child discloses abuse and is put back in the home and subjected to more abuse,” he said. “It was a tragedy.”
Discretionary discipline
The case is one of thousands detailed in disciplinary files from more than 200 small law enforcement agencies across New York State reviewed by The New York Times and New York Focus, a nonprofit newsroom. The files, obtained through records requests, suggest that officers who committed similar kinds of misconduct were disciplined in different ways.
In 2023, for example, two sergeants in small departments — one in Canandaigua and the other in Endicott — were forced out of the job after initiating sexual relationships with victims of crimes. But a deputy sheriff in Steuben County who responded to a mental health call about a woman — and then had sex with her at the scene — was only suspended for 14 days and lost 150 hours of leave, according to disciplinary records. He remains with the department.
In 2022, two officers in different departments failed to investigate numerous crimes. A detective in Geneva, a city on Seneca Lake, was suspended for 10 days without pay and demoted to patrol officer, according to his personnel file, after he did not complete numerous cases going back to 2020.
But in Warren County, at the base of the Adirondack Mountains, a deputy sheriff who repeatedly failed to complete investigations and file reports over a 10-month period lost 24 hours of accrued leave. A disciplinary investigation found 78 unopened voice mail messages on his work phone; supervisors wrote that his actions constituted “acts of incompetence,” according to disciplinary records. He remained with the department until retiring in 2025.
In New York, unlike in at least 17 other states, lawmakers and regulators do not track police discipline across agencies, which could help show disciplinary patterns. In New Jersey, for example, police agencies are required to file an annual report with the attorney general describing officer terminations, demotions and suspensions of more than five days. These reports must also be published on the agency’s website.
But in New York, police agencies are required only to report complaints about an officer to the attorney general if the officer faces five or more civilian complaints over a two-year period.
The 2020 repeal of a confidentiality provision in state law made decades of officer disciplinary documents accessible to the public. Files from some large departments, like the New York Police Department, have been published online.
But in hundreds of small departments, cases of misconduct remain largely hidden.
‘Everybody knew’
In almost all officer disciplinary cases, the files show, departments investigate allegations after a civilian files a complaint or a supervisor identifies a policy violation. But Investigator Morehouse’s case is unusual because Mr. Casella, the county district attorney, filed the complaint.
In an interview in his office in the county courthouse, Mr. Casella said that he thought she didn’t “have the moral fortitude to be in a position to make an arrest.”
She began working in the office of around 35 officers in 2013 as a part-time corrections officer, according to a job application. She became full-time in 2015, and was promoted to deputy sheriff in 2016. She volunteered at a fire department, led the dive team at the sheriff’s office and helped start the “Cops, Kids, Toys” drive.
In 2016, documents show, her supervisors began noting recurrent “officer safety” issues, such as her failure to handcuff people before putting them in her patrol car.
Then, in 2019, she failed to file an official report after a mother reported that her daughter had been sexually assaulted a year earlier. In a recommendation memo, her sergeant wrote: “I am unable to ascertain if the nonfeasance was because of unwillingness to put forth the effort or because there is a lack of investigative skill.” The sergeant added: “I do not have a documented course of conduct that would suggest a pattern of this type of behavior.”
She received a written reprimand.
In 2021, after more safety concerns about traffic patrol issues, a supervisor wrote in a personnel complaint that he was worried Investigator Morehouse would “end up injured or worse killed.” She was issued a written reprimand and received remedial training.
The next year, she was promoted to investigator.
“It’s really troubling to me that the previous administration would have saw fit to promote her given her file,” Mr. Casella said.
According to experts who train officers in child sexual abuse investigations, Investigator Morehouse’s actions in the teen’s 2023 case violated basic principles of such inquiries.
She interviewed other children in the teen’s home, where the abuse allegedly occurred, and in front of the mother, who denied the allegations. She wrote in a police report that the children, both foster and biological, “appeared to possibly have been coached.” (She wrote that the mother would not permit the children to speak to her alone.)
At one point, Investigator Morehouse asked the teen if she had written a letter that recanted the allegations.
“No,” the teen responded.
Investigator Morehouse wrote in her report that the teen’s mother then “made a noise and said, ‘It’s in your handwriting, isn’t it?’” The teen “changed her answer to ‘yeah.’”
Child Protective Services did not pursue the case further because of the letter and insufficient evidence, according to Mr. Casella’s complaint. Officials at the agency understood that Investigator Morehouse “did not believe the allegations,” the complaint noted.
But when the State Police took over the investigation, the abuse became apparent. Other children in the home described witnessing instances of physical abuse and inappropriate touching to State Police officers and the district attorney’s office, court filings show.
“Everybody knew,” Mr. Casella said of the other children.
Amy Miller, the commissioner of Social Services for Yates County, declined to comment, as did Jessica Mullins, the county administrator. The father’s defense attorneys declined to comment, citing ongoing court proceedings. (In October, he was charged with sexually abusing another foster child, a charge his wife denied in an interview.)
In an interview, Sheriff Ryan said that Investigator Morehouse had been in over her head.
“I think it would probably be fair to say that it became overwhelming,” he said.
He also acknowledged that she had not followed a series of investigative steps suggested by Mr. Casella. He did not elaborate.
When Mr. Casella prepared to take the case to a grand jury in late 2023, he asked Investigator Morehouse for the complete case file. He learned that she had accidentally recorded herself telling a colleague that she did not believe the teen’s allegations. (She said in a disciplinary interview that she thought the recorder had been out of battery.)
Mr. Casella’s assistant said Investigator Morehouse had asked if she could trim the audio without it being considered evidence tampering. She explained that it was a large file and, according to his complaint, that it would be helpful for the father’s defense.
Investigator Morehouse never sent it, but Mr. Casella eventually got the full audio from the department. He wrote in his complaint that her actions were “an extraordinary violation of trust and constitutional civil rights” and that her “conclusion, absent any investigative efforts that the allegation was baseless, betrays her unfitness as a law enforcement officer.”
A veil of secrecy
In April 2025, over a year after she received a written reprimand in the teen’s case, Investigator Morehouse, 36, was demoted to deputy sheriff.
It came after a string of allegations documented in a new complaint by Mr. Casella: Investigator Morehouse had failed to properly investigate two welfare fraud cases. He also said she withheld records from his office.
Sheriff Ryan said that she had been demoted because “it wasn’t something that we could try and do remedial training.” His office employs a “progressive discipline” system, he explained, with the disciplinary process considering an officer’s current misconduct and history.
“It’s been a matter of trying to get her back up to where we feel she should be,” he added, “and feeling that she has redeeming qualities that she can move forward.”
In a recent statement, he said his goal was providing “effective, professional law enforcement.”
The demotion was handled through a settlement agreement negotiated by her union. (Her union representative did not respond to emails requesting comment.)
The agreement, obtained in July after a records request, contained a confidentiality clause and a potential reprieve: If she completed a probationary period, records regarding her most recent discipline “shall be expunged from her official personnel file.”
Republicans in the New York Legislature have introduced a bill that may once again make serious disciplinary findings like these confidential, though it is unlikely to pass, given Democrats control both chambers.
The probationary period for Officer Morehouse, now a deputy sheriff, ended in October. She continues to patrol the streets of Yates County.
But Mr. Casella has vowed not to call her as a witness in any cases. He said he had not confronted a case in which her testimony was necessary.
“Thankfully,” he said, “she’s been a relatively unproductive officer.”
Sarah Cohen contributed reporting.
This article was reported in partnership with Big Local News at Stanford University, and with support from MuckRock, the Fund for Investigative Journalism and the Data-Driven Reporting Project.
Sammy Sussman is an investigative reporter who writes about police and policing in New York State as part of The Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship.
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