St. Louis County prosecutors have charged 26-year-old Torre Dyson of Hazelwood with felony sexual conduct in the course of public duty involving a detainee, accusing him of assaulting a handcuffed woman inside a small north county police department that was already unraveling. Dyson, who was assigned to the Riverview Police Department, was taken into custody and held on bond following the charge filed Wednesday.
According to charging documents cited by St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the woman's boyfriend had called police to have her removed from her home. St. Louis County police reported that Dyson was dispatched to her home the day after that call, and that he arrested her in her nightgown before taking her from her home to the Riverview police station.
Dyson is accused of sexually assaulting the woman while she was handcuffed, per the charging documents. He never notified dispatchers or supervisors that he had made an arrest, and he ultimately released her without booking her or filing any charges against her, according to the paper's reporting.
Bond Set at $50,000 as Investigators Build Their Case
Dyson was held on a $50,000 cash-only bond following the charge, with court conditions barring the usual 10% cash deposit option, according to RiverBender.
St. Louis County detectives executed a search warrant at Riverview City Hall and recovered station video footage, which St. Louis County police said corroborated the victim's account and confirmed that no official arrest paperwork for her ever existed, per the station's reporting. The search warrant followed the woman's report of the incident, and the missing paperwork became a key piece of evidence tying the alleged assault to Dyson's failure to log the arrest in the first place.
No Consent Defense Under Missouri Law
Dyson faces one count of sexual conduct in the course of public duty with a prisoner. Under Missouri Revised Statutes § 566.145, engaging in sexual conduct with a detainee while serving as a law enforcement officer is a Class E felony, and the law explicitly states that a victim's consent is not a legal defense, according to the Missouri Revisor of Statutes. The statute was written to protect people held under involuntary restraint or police custody from exactly the kind of power imbalance prosecutors allege played out at the Riverview station.
A conviction on a Class E felony carries a potential sentence of up to four years in state prison or one year in county jail, along with mandatory sex offender registration and DNA collection, per the Missouri State Highway Patrol's charge code manual. The case echoes a recent one from the region: in July, a former St. Louis City Sheriff's deputy pleaded guilty to two Class E felony counts under the same statute for sexual contact with a female detainee at the City Justice Center, according to the 22nd Judicial Circuit Court. That former deputy received three years of probation and mandatory sex offender registration.
A Department Already in Crisis
Dyson's arrest lands on top of a municipality already in freefall. One month before his indictment, Riverview placed its police officers on fiscal furlough and shifted routine patrols in the roughly 2,300-resident municipality over to the St. Louis County Police Department, according to KSDK.
That furlough came on the heels of an even darker scandal. In January, Riverview Mayor Mike Cornell Jr. was arrested and indicted on nine felony counts, including statutory sodomy, sexual abuse, harassment, and child pornography, accused of misusing his office to harass municipal personnel.
Dyson had previously completed the St. Louis Police Cadet Program and graduated from the St. Louis Police Academy in 2021 before going on to serve as a Metropolitan Police officer in St. Louis, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's earlier reporting on his academy class. It's unclear how long he had been with Riverview before the department's officers were furloughed and county police took over its streets.
