COLUMBIA, S.C. — A Richland County school police officer who admitted to sexually abusing two students was sentenced to probation Tuesday after a judge partially accepted a plea deal recommended by prosecutors.
By Jenn Abelson
and Instead, Richland County Solicitor Byron Gipson’s office offered Bradley a deal that spared him prison time in exchange for pleading guilty to two felonies: assault and battery of one student and sexual battery of another. He was placed on probation for three years.
Solicitors did not recommend that Bradley be put on the state’s sex offender registry. But Judge Daniel Coble ordered Bradley to register as a sex offender.
“It was a mistake but there are consequences,” Coble told Bradley.
Bradley, 45, appeared at the hearing with his wife and his parents. He declined to comment to a reporter before the hearing. Bradley told the judge he has not been employed since he was fired from the Richland County Sheriff’s Department.
Bradley offered a short statement, saying he has been working hard to better himself and that it was never his intention to cause harm. He offered a “sincerest apology to all individuals and families involved.”
A statement from one of Bradley’s victims was not read aloud in court but was provided to The Washington Post before the hearing. The Post does not identify victims of alleged sexual abuse without their consent. With the former student’s permission, The Post is identifying her by her first name, Kay.
“You took my trust in men, and you took my trust in law enforcement. … You were someone who was paid to protect, and yet all you did was harm,” Kay wrote in her statement. “You deserve a harsher punishment, but that’s not up to me.”
Bradley’s sentence of probation was handed down one day after a Washington Post investigation revealed that the Justice Department and many law enforcement agencies and school systems across the country have failed to take basic steps to prevent sexual misconduct and root out abusive school cops.
The Post found that Richland County school and law enforcement officials dismissed or failed to thoroughly investigate years of sexual misconduct complaints against Bradley. The first report of inappropriate behavior was made in 2010. Bradley was not arrested until 2019.
Bradley’s attorney and Richland County officials have declined to comment on The Post’s findings. But Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott issued a statement after Tuesday’s sentencing: “No amount of jail time would fix what Bradley destroyed. I am grateful that he finally accepted responsibility for his repulsive actions. I apologize to the victims, their families, and our community and I will do everything in my power to ensure this never happens again.”
In 2018, after a 15-year-old sophomore reported being sexually assaulted by Bradley in his office during the school day, Bradley was allowed to return to his job patrolling the high school. Within months, Bradley sexually abused 17-year-old Kay.
As a high-schooler, Kay thought she could trust the school resource officer because his wife was her longtime therapist. Instead, she said, Bradley called her his “little secret.” She told The Post that when she was a senior, the deputy repeatedly groped her on the high school football field and once inside his patrol car.
Bradley pleaded guilty to assault and battery for a night in 2018 when, prosecutors said, he drove Kay to a dead-end road. Kay told The Post that Bradley penetrated her with his fingers as she said no and pulled away.
Bradley also pleaded guilty to sexual battery with a student for abusing a second Spring Valley teenager in his office at the high school.
With her permission, The Post is identifying her by her middle name, Jennifer.
Jennifer, who did not attend Tuesday’s hearing, said in an interview that she wanted to put the criminal case behind her after it dragged on for more than four years. She thinks Bradley deserves to be on the sex offender registry.
“It wasn’t just me,” Jennifer told The Post. “It was multiple kids.”
Assistant Solicitor Kathryn Cavanaugh declined to answer questions about why the solicitor’s office chose not to recommend Bradley be required to register as a sex offender. She told the judge her goal was for Bradley to never again work in law enforcement or schools, and that he would be held accountable for his actions without putting the victims through a trial.
Taylor Bell, a lawyer representing Jennifer, spoke at the hearing. When he began to discuss the sheriff’s department’s decision to keep Bradley in schools despite complaints, the judge cut him off.
Complaints about Bradley’s interactions with Jennifer were twice reported to school and law enforcement officials during the 2015-2016 school year, including once from Bradley’s own colleagues who saw him late at night in a secluded parking lot alone with the 17-year-old. A mother of Jennifer’s friend reported that Bradley was having “a sexual relationship” with a student. The friend’s mother emailed then-superintendent Debbie Hamm: “I am afraid that it will be brushed aside, as it has been in the past.”
Hamm declined to comment.
Bradley was verbally reprimanded by his supervisor in the sheriff’s department for meeting Jennifer after school hours, and internal affairs deemed the mother’s complaint “non-sustained” because of insufficient evidence. The deputy was allowed to remain working as a school resource officer at Spring Valley High School.
Bradley, a former star basketball player at the University of South Carolina, had been personally recruited to be a school police officer in 2007 by Lott, the longtime Richland County sheriff.
Lott, who would not answer questions from The Post, did not attend Bradley’s sentencing Tuesday.
When announcing Bradley’s arrest in 2019, Lott called the deputy “a sexual predator” and “a monster that worked among us that we did not know about.”
Lott had defended Bradley in a sworn deposition a few months before the arrest, saying that he did not find repeated accusations of Bradley’s inappropriate behavior with teen girls suspicious.
The sheriff was deposed as part of a lawsuit filed by a third girl Bradley allegedly abused on the campus of Spring Valley High School. With her permission, The Post is identifying her by her middle name, Dianah.
In spring 2018, Dianah reported that Bradley molested her in his office twice and groped her on campus three times, including once between her legs while the principal was standing nearby.
By the time Dianah came forward to school and law enforcement officials, Bradley had already been the subject of at least five complaints in his nine years at Spring Valley, according to law enforcement records and court documents reviewed by The Post. Parents, fellow deputies, an administrator and a coach had all raised concerns that Bradley was acting inappropriately with teenage girls.
But shortly after Bradley personally contacted the sheriff, the criminal investigation was closed.
A sheriff’s department investigator involved in the case apologized to Dianah, saying that the department was “prematurely closing the case without looking at all of the evidence,” according to notes from Dianah’s therapist, who was present for the conversation. The investigator told Dianah that she believed her story, but that Bradley was “a unicorn in the force … considered rare and precious and above reproach.”
Dianah and her mother filed a lawsuit against the sheriff’s department, Bradley and Richland County School District Two. News about the lawsuit led Kay to come forward.
Concerns about what the lawsuit would uncover led Bradley to show up at Jennifer’s apartment in 2019, she said.
Jennifer, in an affidavit and deposition, said Bradley instructed her to cover for him if anyone came asking questions. Jennifer told The Post that she felt harassed after officials from the sheriff’s department also visited her apartment, childhood home and job. During a deposition for Dianah’s lawsuit, she revealed that Bradley had repeatedly sexually abused her in his school office when she was a senior.
But while Richland County authorities filed charges against Bradley for what happened with Kay and Jennifer, they did not do so for Dianah. The South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, which often handles criminal investigations of local officers, said no one from the sheriff’s department or solicitor’s office has asked it to review Dianah’s sexual assault complaint.
The sheriff’s department and school district eventually agreed to settle Dianah’s lawsuit for $900,000.
Last month, Dianah received an email from the forensic interviewer involved in the criminal investigation. That woman now works for the prosecutor’s office. She invited Dianah, who has since moved out of state, to return to South Carolina to watch Bradley plead guilty in the cases involving the two other girls.
The email, which was reviewed by The Post, informed Dianah that she would not be able to speak about her own experiences with Bradley at the hearing.
“It feels like a slap in the face. I’m gonna show up somewhere just for them to say, ‘Glad you’re here, but you didn’t really matter?' ” Dianah said. “It still feels like what happened to me meant nothing to everyone.”
At the hearing Tuesday, there was no mention of Dianah.
Of the three students who came forward, Dianah was the only one who alerted school and law enforcement officials within weeks of the alleged abuse. She is also the only one of them who is Black, according to law enforcement documents The Post obtained through public records requests, court documents and interviews with the three students.
Dianah said she believes her race played a role in how her complaint was handled by officials.
“They dismissed me at every step,” she told The Post.
The sheriff’s department has refused public records requests from The Post to release multiple records from its investigations into Bradley, including the polygraph video recorded during the investigation into Dianah’s complaint.
Because Bradley will be subject to South Carolina’s sex offender conditions, he will be prohibited from being near schools like the ones he used to patrol.
But he will not spend any time behind bars. At the hearing, his wife urged the judge to spare him prison time, saying her husband has “dedicated his life to Christ” and is an “incredible father” to his two children. She lamented that he will not be able to coach his children’s youth sports teams.
His attorney, Gill Bell Jr., argued that Bradley “spent most of his life doing the right thing,” touting the former SRO’s basketball career and work with disabled children. He said Bradley deeply regrets what he has put his family and “these ladies” through. After the hearing, Bell blamed The Post’s investigation for the judge’s decision to require Bradley to register as a sex offender, saying he plans to file a motion to reconsider the order.
The deal that allows Bradley to avoid prison time is not unusual for law enforcement officers convicted of crimes involving child sexual abuse.
Earlier this year, a Post investigation revealed that hundreds of law enforcement officers accused of child sexual abuse have avoided serious consequences in the criminal justice system, even after they admitted to wrongdoing. The Post identified at least 1,200 officers convicted of charges stemming from child sexual abuse from 2005 through 2020. Nearly 40 percent of those convicted officers avoided prison sentences.
