Former Fresno Ex-cop pleads no contest to rape

Former Fresno police officer William Wyatt pleaded no contest Thursday afternoon to raping a woman while she was unconscious.

The plea in Fresno County Superior Court comes five years after the woman, a former Reedley police officer, contended she was date raped in 2010.

Wyatt, who is free on bond, will be sentenced on July 14.

Fresno defense attorney Mark Broughton, who represented Wyatt, said Thursday his client accepted a plea agreement because it offered him “probation with no additional time in custody.”

If Wyatt, 36, had been convicted at trial, he would have faced up to eight years in prison.

Wyatt joined the force in 2003 as a patrol officer. A department spokesman said Wyatt was terminated Sept. 19, 2012.

The case against him surfaced in January 2012, when Chief Jerry Dyer said he learned of the allegation from Reedley police Chief Joe Garza, who called him to report that a female officer had accused Wyatt of “sexually assaulting her without her knowledge and while she was incapacitated.”

Once the allegation surfaced, Dyer took Wyatt’s badge, gun and power to make an arrest.

According to the court documents, a sergeant in Fresno Police Department’s Internal Affairs notified Fresno County sheriff’s detective Andrea McCormick about the rape allegation on Jan. 19, 2012. The Sheriff’s Department investigated because the crime happened in a county island in Fresno near Palm and Gettysburg avenues.

McCormick wrote in an affidavit that the woman said Wyatt and two of his friends went with her to Club Habanos in northwest Fresno for drinks in the summer of 2010.

The woman said she remembered only arriving at the bar but nothing else “due to heavy alcohol consumption,” McCormick wrote in her affidavit. The woman remembered waking up the following morning in Wyatt’s bedroom wearing sweat pants and a white T-shirt that didn’t belong to her. She then asked Wyatt to take her home.

The woman didn’t know she had been raped until Jan. 18, 2012, when she learned of photographs on Wyatt’s computer that showed her having sex with him, McCormick wrote.

The woman told the detective that the photographs showed “she is clearly passed out while the officer was having sex with her,” the affidavit said.

The woman also told the detective that she didn’t remember having sex and could not have given consent because she was extremely intoxicated, the affidavit said.

McCormick’s affidavit was in support of a warrant to search Wyatt’s home. Several computers and an iPhone were seized as evidence, the court documents said.

Wyatt was arrested in August 2012. After being booked into jail, he was released after posting bail.

This story was originally published May 28, 2015 at 6:21 PM with the headline "Former Fresno Ex-cop pleads no contest to rape."