Crime & Safety

Police: Non-Report of Sexual Assault Was Oversight

Steve Disbennett, chief of the Brentwood Police Department, said it was a mistake that the reported sexual assault on March 9 wasn't included in the department's weekly update to the public and media.

On March 9, it was reported that a 20-year-old woman was abducted at gunpoint and taken to , where three suspects sexually assaulted her, according to an article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Besides the suspected crime itself, what concerns Ward 1 resident Kelly Goodwin and those she's talked with, she said, is that the didn't release information about the incident until more than a month after it happened.

Chief Steve Disbennett said the department wasn’t intentionally trying to hide anything by not releasing information about the incident. The department releases a weekly account of crimes to the media, and the March 9 incident in Brentwood Park wasn't on it.

Find out what's happening in Maplewood-Brentwoodwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

"Aparently it was an oversight," he said. "There was no reason, collusion, hiding — we would never do that. It apparently was an oversight that it just didn’t get posted. And we are working on correcting that as we speak."


Get more local news delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for free Patch newsletters and alerts.

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

To request removal of your name from an arrest report, submit these required items to arrestreports@patch.com.

More from Maplewood-Brentwood