Child Porn Charges Dropped Against Wenatchee Valley Chiropractor Wayne Latimer
And Grace City Church 'Stronger Man' Nick Turner's Trial for Rape and Incest Set
Wenatchee Valley Chiropractor Wayne Latimer walked out of a Chelan County Superior courtroom this morning legally exonerated after Chelan County Assistant Prosecutor Chad Jenks filed a motion to withdraw all charges against him.
Latimer had been arrested after a “cyber tip” came in that he downloaded child porn via Facebook in June 2022. Facebook’s parent company Meta uses AI and filters that run all images shared on its platforms through a database of images cataloged by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, or NCMEC. Those known child porn images all have “hash-values,” or metadata, and when those hash values are recognized it triggers a red flag.
The tip said Latimer (or someone using his Facebook account) downloaded content with some of those hash-values via Facebook messenger in Cashmere at about 5 a.m. one morning.
So Latimer was arrested and his East Wenatchee home and Wenatchee and Leavenworth businesses searched. Authorities seized devices ranging from laptops and cell phones to thumb drives.
But no child porn was found, Jenks admitted to Superior Court Judge Travis Brandt.
“I take it the state does not believe that it can prove the current charges beyond a reasonable doubt?” Brandt asked.
Jenks said they had seized 26 devices and had come up with no evidence.
“Just to be blunt about it, there were nine counts in this case,” Jenks said. “They were referring to specific images which would have hash values, which was part of the original tip. Of the 26 (devices) – none of those images were located.”
Brandon Redal, Latimer’s attorney, expressed frustration at the fact that it took this long for the charges against his client to be dropped.
He lays the blame on former Chelan County Assistant Prosecutor Julia Hartnell and said as much in court without calling her out by name.
“In November 2022 I had a conversation with a former prosecutor, asking for an update about when we could expect to see the evidence in this case,” Redal said. “And she indicated to me, and this cryptic comment really didn’t make sense to me in the moment, but what she indicated to me was that ‘the evidence wasn’t what we, the state, believed it to be originally.’”
Outside of court, Redal was more direct.
“Hartnell is full of shit, and you can quote me on that,” he said.
He said the nature of an accusation like this can do irreparable damage to someone’s reputation, and Latimer had patients quit coming to his practices, employees walk out and business relationships fray because of it.
He also said his client has had to spend at least $100,000 between bail and legal fees to fight these charges, and that’s money he’ll never get back.
“My hope is that people understand that this isn’t a case where the state couldn’t meet its burden,” Redal said. “Because it’s not a case they just couldn’t make. This is a case where he was always factually innocent.”
He said he’s a “one-trick pony” defense lawyer and can’t speak to cases other lawyers might bring because of this, but said he tends to believe his client will “look into options he may have” in the form of a civil case against the Chelan County prosecutor’s office and/or former Deputy Prosecutor Hartnell.
He said when the bar required to arrest and charge someone is so low, this could happen to anyone.
“All of the red flags were ignored,” he said. “It’s a product of a rush to judgment, tunnel vision, whatever you want to call it. That’s what it was. People need to know.”
Hartnell is no longer with the Chelan County Prosecutor’s Office and now works for the Snohomish County Prosecutor’s Office. There are some other cases Hartnell worked on I am looking into and I plan to write a follow up focused on those in the future.
You can listen to an entire interview with Redal after court below. NCWlife reporter Jefferson Robbins and I were the only two reporters who attended court in person this morning.
“Make sure your Facebook is secure,” Latimer said as he left the courtroom.
Nicholas Turner’s Trial For Charges of Rape, Incest Set
A date was set for Nick Turner’s trial this morning in Judge Brandt’s court as well. Turner is set to go on trial facing charges of rape and incest on Oct. 31. You can read more about Turner and his affiliation with Grace City Church here.
One interesting thing to note is that fellow Grace City Church member, “Stronger Man” and owner of Orchard Corset, Jeff Kurpuis, was in the gallery during Turner’s arraignment.
According to his employees, Kurpuis is a proud leader in a local militia group and talks about it a lot at work. In addition to being a part of a group of armed men who stalked peaceful protestors through the streets of Wenatchee during a Black Lives Matter march in 2020, he was also a part of another group organized by Grace City Church pastor Carey McPherson to harass and shut down a Wenatchee School Board meeting in 2021.
I will cover Turner’s trial and any other interesting developments in that story as they arise.
This is unfortunate. These are the kinds of charges that have to be properly investigated BEFORE a very public arrest. Can this innocent man recover his life? Prosecutors should not be immune to improper filings.
Appreciate your balanced and even-handed reporting, Dom!