UPDATED: Sharon Reddick, a Rutherford County Assistant District Attorney, will head to nearby Wilson County to represent the state in a sexual assault case that is more than 40-years old.
An investigation by Special Agents with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation resulted in the indictment and arrest of a man charged with the alleged sexual assault of a child who was under the age of 13 between the years of 1979 and 1985. The indictment filed on November 20, 2020 alleged that Donald Haynes engaged in unlawful sexual penetration to the child.
Today, victim Crista Johnston is in her forties…
She said that she first went to authorities in the 1980’s to report the abuse, but an arrest was not made until the TBI got involved in the case last year (2020). Johnston told WGNS NEWS what happened in 1986, which is when she said she first went to detectives…
Johnston would have been a teenager the first time she went to authorities.
The reported victim (Johnston) said it has been emotionally damaging to live all of those years without a law enforcement agency moving forward with a complete investigation...
The reason the case is now moving forward is because it was realized that there was not a statute of limitations in her case that is tied law written between the years of 1979 and 1989. In that 11-year window, Tennessee Code Annotated showed that crimes punishable by death or life imprisonment did not have a statute of limitations. Then, forcible rape and aggravated rape to a victim under the age of 13 were charges that carried the possibility of life imprisonment – which means those two charges had no statute of limitations. Again, this is only true if the crime took place between 1978 and 1989.
Hale is scheduled to appear in a Wilson County Courtroom later this month on June 21, 2021.
