Mother Speaking Out Against 'Inept' Okanogan County Officials After Son Sexually Assaulted in Brewster
Carrie Stadler accuses Okanogan County officials of having a double standard when it comes to sexual assault, says her son didn't get the justice he deserves
Trigger warning: this article contains references to and details of a sexual assault, suicidal ideation and vulgar language.
Note: The names of the young men in this article have been changed per request by the victim’s mother.
In November 2020, Carrie Stalder and her husband took their son and two of his friends to their vacation home and rental property in Brewster, Washington.
It was her son Jayce’s 17th birthday and the Covid-19 pandemic had disrupted life across the planet. So the couple thought a getaway to the remote Okanogan County town, with a population of just over 2,000, would be a good way to give the boys a change of scenery and a place to have fun for the weekend.
As it turns out the danger to her son didn’t come in the form of a respiratory virus, but one of the boys they brought with them.
According to an Okanogan County Sheriff’s report, Jayce’s friend Paul, then 16, used a pool stick to assault Jayce on the night of Nov. 7, 2020. According to Stalder and an Okanogan County Sheriff’s Office report, while Jayce was laying on his stomach chatting with girlfriend on a FaceTime call Paul came up behind him with the pool stick.
“He was holding it through his pants and underwear like by his crotch,” Stalder said. “And then he jammed it so hard in my son’s anus that it caused a ruptured intestine. There was free air in his belly, which you can actually die from.”
During the assault Paul yelled, “Get fucked!” Okanogan County Undersheriff David Yarnell wrote in the report. Jayce jumped up and tried to chase Paul to “beat him up” but ended up in the bathroom “pooping blood” and vomiting.
Jayce spent hours in the shower and he told Yarnell that he began to feel hot.
“He went outside on the grass because he was burning with fever,” Yarnell wrote. “His sister was not aware what happened. His parents didn’t know anything. Jayce said he was going to jump in the river because he was hot and in pain. He thought he either needed to get help or jump in the river and die.”
The third boy checked in on his friend through the night and after about eight hours he and Jayce came to Stalder, who had been upstairs.
“He immediately told me: ‘I need to go to the ER,’” she said.
So they rushed him to Three Rivers Hospital in Brewster where doctors noticed the free air in his abdomen and said he needed an emergency surgery. From there he was transported to Mid Valley in Omak by ambulance where a surgeon repaired perforated diverticulum, or in layman’s terms – a hole in his bowel. He also had his appendix removed during the surgery, which Stalder said was a result of the inflammation.
The sexual nature of the assault caused Jayce to feel great shame, and he wouldn’t tell his parents or the doctors what had really happened.
“Jayce said he didn’t want people to think he was gay,” Yarnell wrote.
At that point he also didn’t want to “get his friend in trouble” Stadler said, so at some point the three boys had decided not to say what happened that night.
After the incident Jayce spiraled into a depression, began drinking heavily and started skipping school.
“My son just breaks down mentally over the next year,” Stalder said. “He changes his whole friend group. I think he ends up getting hurt in sports because he had lost all this weight because of the surgery and he wasn’t in his best athletic shape anymore.”
Eventually they decided to send Jayce to a rehabilitation facility in Texas. There Jayce opened up and told the story of what happened that night to his counselor. When Stalder picked her son up from that facility 28 days later, he told her what happened and said Paul had been bullying him for years prior.
But since the assault Paul’s taunts had turned sexual.
“He (Paul) would say things like, ‘Oh, now you have to tell people you’re part of my body count,’” she said. “That means that he like, had sex with him, right? In essence just by that he was saying he raped my son.”
So in March 2022, she contacted Okanogan County Sheriff’s Office. In Yarnell’s report he wrote that Stalder had called to report that her son had been “assaulted by a high school friend, in a somewhat sexual manner.”
Yet according to Okanogan County call log notes, a dispatcher did enter the word “rape” into her initial report.
On March 12, Jayce gave his statement to Yarnell. He started an investigation, visited the rental property, took photos and spoke with the third boy, who we’ll call Luke.
Luke confirmed that Paul was “holding the pool stick like a penis and said ‘Get fucked’” while he “thrust the pool stick into Jayce’s butt” that night.
But Paul declined to speak to authorities about the matter.
“So we only have one side to the story,” Yarnell said.
But he never reached out to the girl who Jayce was video chatting with at the time of her son’s rape, Stalder said. Nor did he attempt to locate a video taken by Luke later that night clearly showing her son in pain, she said.
On April 7, Yarnell requested the Okanogan County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office review the evidence he had gathered and recommended the county charge Paul with Assault 3rd Degree.
That recommendation was a disappointing to Stalder, and she contacted Yarnell to make her feelings known.
“Yarnell told me it couldn’t be rape because Paul isn’t gay,” she said.
Yarnell denied saying any such thing.
From there the case was handed off to a series of Okanogan County prosecutors, the first of whom, Lori Pruess, charged Paul with Rape 1st Degree.
“What happened to victim is absolutely tragic,” she wrote in an email to Stalder in May 2022. “It is why I charged Paul with Rape 1 instead of assault. Rape is more serious, and the facts fit the crime.”
But Pruess wasn’t on the case long before it was handed off to Coleen St. Clair, the Chief Criminal Deputy Prosecutor for the county. According to Stalder, St. Clair agreed Rape 1 charges were appropriate.
Then the case was handed off to another prosecutor named Stan Meyers, who told Stalder they would never take a plea agreement from a defendant who expressed no remorse.
The case was then handed off to a fourth prosecuting attorney, Taima Carden, who gave Paul a plea deal. The deal was that the Okanogan County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office would not take Paul to trial to press a Rape 1 charge if he plead guilty to Assault 3.
The change in direction came as a surprise to Stalder, who said she only learned of it when she phoned into a hearing on August 29, 2024 and listened to Paul and his family discussing the deal.
“I immediately reached out to prosecutors office for information, as no one had notified victim about a plea agreement,” Stalder wrote. “The 4th prosecutor never talked my son and may not have know the details of the case.”
Throughout the game of prosecutorial musical chairs, a victim advocate named Stacie Nicholson was also assigned to the case. Victim advocates are trained to support victims of crime, help them find resources, help them fill out the correct legal forms and keep them informed of the proceedings.
But Stalder said Nicholson was rarely in the office, would not get back to her messages and even provided incorrect information for hearing dates and call-in information on a few occasions. Stalder said both Carden and Nicholson were rude and dismissive.
“The 4th prosecutor offered no empathy to victim or myself (on separate calls),” she wrote. “She was rude, unprofessional and heartless.”
But Okanogan County Prosecuting Attorney Albert Lin said Carden and Nicholson did communicate the decision to give Paul a plea deal.
“In July 2024, the decision to resolve the case with a plea to Assault 3 was based on consultation between DPA Taima Carden and senior staff of the Okanogan County Prosecutor’s Office,” Lin wrote in an email. “This decision was based on review of medical records, defense expert opinion, police reports, and statements given by witnesses and Jayce, and the civil settlement where Jayce admitted the injuries he sustained resulted from the simple act of negligence on the part of Paul.”
The tort case Lin is referring to was going through the civil courts at the same time as the criminal case. The Stalder’s sued Paul and his family, initially seeking $677,657 in damages. That case was settled for $150,000 – $100,000 coming from the Allstate Insurance Company and $50,000 from Paul and his parents.
Attached to his response email, Lin included a lengthy document from Paul’s lawyer, Emily Gause, of Gause Law Offices PLLC in Tukwila. That attachment included a copy of the settlement agreement in the civil case, signed by Jayce on May 28, 2024, that included the following statement:
“Jayce continues to maintain that the injuries he sustained during the incident resulted from a simple act of negligence on the of Paul.”
It also included a letter from Dr. Steven Medwell, a medical expert hired by Gause.
Medwell, who practiced colorectal surgery in Seattle from 1978 to 2018 and held teaching appointments at both Swedish Hospital and the University of Washington during that time, wrote that it was “entirely implausible” that Paul’s actions led to the need for Jayce’s surgery.
“The likelihood of someone taking a pool cue and penetrating someone’s pants, entering the rectum, and then subsequently being threaded up 15 cm to find a diverticula that it would then perforate is almost impossible with the findings as noted in the case,” he wrote.
Gause wanted the court to dismiss the charges against Paul entirely, and her case for that rested on three points:
“The facts do not support the charge of Rape in the First Degree,” she wrote. “The civil lawsuit demonstrates that Jayce and his family are motivated by money, and are using this case to further their financial goals.”
The third rested on Dr. Medwell’s letter and testimony.
She pointed to the fact that her client is an Eagle Scout, and has the support of family, friends and former coaches.
“Paul is a good kid who is being wrongfully blamed,” she wrote.
Stalder said money they got from the civil settlement all went to attorney fees and to pay for Jayce’s treatment. They certainly didn’t get rich off it, she said, and pursuing a civil case against someone who raped your son is the least anyone in their position would do.
Her son was a young, healthy, athletic boy with no history of colon issues, she said. And the doctor who did the surgery to repair Jayce’s colon told her that only he sees that type of perforated bowel in elderly, obese adults with habits that exacerbate health issues – like smoking.
As far as weighing in on Paul’s character, she said Jayce does not want to pursue a campaign of personal retribution against the young man her son once considered his best friend. What they want is accountability for the Okanogan County Sheriff’s Office and Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, who Stalder called “inept and corrupt.”
She said there’s an institutional “double standard” that needs to be addressed. An underaged girl and her family would never have been treated with such callousness and unprofessionalism by the prosecutor’s office.
She also said that Yarnell did not do his due diligence.
“There was a video that was taken of Jayce in pain after the rape,” she wrote in a text. “I’m sure it could have been collected had law enforcement asked about it. At sentencing, the defense attorney said that no one really knew how injured Jayce was. There were two witnesses AND a video that was never collected.”
The second witness Stalder is referring to is Jayce’s girlfriend at the time, who was on a video chat with Jayce at the time of the incident.
Yarnell said he put a lot of work into the investigation, but it was difficult because the incident was reported a year later.
In the end, Paul accepted the plea deal – which means he is a felon.
“That is in his file,” Yarnell said. “It’s never going to go anywhere.”
That means his right to own a firearm is revoked, although he can apply for that right to be reinstated at a later time. He also has “12 months supervision” and “must comply with any services recommended by juvenile probation,” Lin wrote.
Paul also had to write an apology to Jayce.
“I’d like this opportunity to apologize for the way my immature teenage actions affected you,” he wrote in a letter to Jayce. “I can’t take back what occurred but I do own up to my mistakes. I know that sometimes I took things too far as a teen but I never meant any harm to you. I cared a lot about you as a friend. I know this has affected everybody involved as it’s been a difficult road to resolution in all this for both our families and everyone else involved. Hopefully we can all move past this event and have closure now that this case is resolved.”
Paul is now a junior at Montana State University and by all accounts, he’s thriving.
But Stalder said that what happened to her son that night “took the sunshine” out of him, and he hasn’t gotten the justice he deserves. She started a Tik Tok account recently and has been speaking out about what happened in a series called “Saving Mr. Sunshine.”
You can watch the first video in that series here.
A Final Word, From Jayce
In the course of reporting this story I sent Carrie three questions for Jayce. Here are those questions and his responses:
DB: “Do you feel like you got justice?”
JS: “I do not feel like I got justice at all, it seemed like their main goal was to sweep it under the rug.”
DB: “What would you want to change, if you could?”
JS: “I would change almost everything. To start is the prosecutors communication to the victims of the crime. There was absolutely no communication from the last prosecutor and the victim advocate. And it was really defeating because it felt like I was alone against the state and the defendant legal staff.”
DB: “How has this impacted you?”
JS: “This was very impactful because it was the hardest thing I have ever gone through, and almost died from. It wasn’t taken seriously. Not by the prosecutors or the police. The impact of them just not caring makes the situation seem small but in reality I was raped and almost died. They didn’t care.”
If you or someone you know is dealing with suicidal thoughts or ideation, free help is available 24/7. Just call or text 988.
If you or anyone you know has been the victim of a sex crime, help is available. Dial 1-800-656-HOPE (4673). That hotline is also 24/7.
I’m so sorry for the victim here—sexual assault is truly life changing.
I’m not sure I understand the claims about double standards. Women and girls don’t generally receive better treatment in the system, in fact, the trauma of dealing with police and the courts prevent many women from reporting sexual assault. Without a side by side comparison, this is probably more accurately addressed as our culture and the systems around it not taking sexual assault seriously. Look no further than our future president and a handful of his cabinet nominees to see that example.
How very tragic for this young guy! But I am confused. His mother says there was a video and two witnesses never brought forth. Why didnt the victim bring it forward? I feel like there is more to this story that we dont know. If there was ineptness on the part of Yarnell or the prosecutors, perhaps the State AG would investigate. Is there a case for violating a victims rights. There is more to know here