A former Campbell County jail officer accused of having sex with an inmate recently pleaded no contest to to a felony charge of sexual assault, court filings showed.
Sean Isaac Allen, 31, pleaded no contest to one count of second-degree sexual assault and saw a charge of third-degree sexual assault dismissed, recent court filings show. He will be sentenced in late July.
“No contest” means Allen did not admit that he committed the crime, but that he did agree prosecutors could obtain a conviction in court on the charges filed against him.
According to a probable cause affidavit, an inmate at the jail reported to Campbell County Sheriff’s Department officials on June 6, 2021, that a relationship was occurring between Allen and a female inmate, identified only as S.R.
The reporting inmate said Allen and S.R. would openly flirt with each other in common areas of the jail block and were having a sexual relationship.
Allen would frequently go into S.R.’s cell with her alone and out of the view of the surveillance cameras when he was working, the reporting inmate said, and S.R. openly bragged about their relationship in the jail block.
The reporting inmate said on several occasions, she heard what sounded like “sexual noises” coming from S.R.’s cell while Allen was alone with her in it.
The jail captain reviewed video footage from the last shift Allen worked and saw he went into S.R.’s cell and out of camera view for several minutes at a time.
The reporting inmate was later interviewed by Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation agents, when she reiterated her story, saying she noticed something odd between Allen and S.R. such as the flirtatious behavior.
She also said S.R. claimed Allen would bring items to her cell and openly talked about “hooking up” with the officer.
The reporting inmate said the relationship between the two was “obvious” and that she had never seen another detention officer enter an inmate’s cell for the length of time Allen was in S.R.’s.
S.R. allegedly said she was “working on him,” meaning she was trying to get him to do what she wanted, the affidavit said.
Another inmate, K.H., was also interviewed by DCI and told agents that she noticed something “weird” between S.R. and Allen the first day she arrived at the jail, a month earlier.
“There is no way he should be in her cell that long,” K.H. told agents. “There is no way he should have been constantly going in and out of her cell.”
K.H. also said that S.R. was “asking for it” and she would regularly walk around the jail block half-dressed.
The inmates interviewed also told agents S.R. was receiving certain benefits from Allen that the rest of them were not, such as contraband or extra items from the commissary.
When interviewed by agents, S.R. said the relationship began in April, when Allen sneaked into her cell and kissed her in the middle of the night. She said she woke up confused and did not know what the officer was doing in her cell.
He continued kissing the inmate and touched her under her cell jumpsuit, she said, and she performed oral sex on him.
After the first incident, Allen continued coming into S.R.’s cell and kissing her, frequently during the daytime, she said. Allen apparently told the woman he liked the “thrill” of their illicit relationship.
In June, S.R. messaged a man who she had been in a relationship with to end it, noting she would be giving herself “fully to a real man who has his [expletive] together, who’s in the Army…someone who likes me a lot and would never do anything to hurt me and he’d give everything just to make me smile.”
Allen was a member of the U.S. Army Reserves at the time of the message’s writing. He had also been an employee of the jail since August 2018.
He was interviewed in late July by DCI agents and acknowledged he had sneaked into S.R.’s cell in April, but asserted nothing happened between the two. He claimed he did it to feel “an adrenaline rush” and there was no particular reason he selected her cell.
Agents showed Allen the message S.R. sent to her former boyfriend and while he acknowledged the description sounded like him and added he had been monitoring the woman’s calls and messages because of what she said.
However, he also said he never spoke with S.R. about what she wrote or told a supervisor about it.
Surveillance footage showed incidents where Allen could be seen walking toward or away from S.R.’s cell, lining up with claims that the two had been intimate on multiple occasions over the three-month period.
