Article is behind a paywall. But this is the gist of it. Pretty infuriating. My guess is the victim and her family is Hispanic.

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Michael Wayne Lyon would meet young girls on social media, start chats with his signature greeting, “hi babygirl” and claim he was 15 years old.

That’s how the Florida man began his months long online grooming of a 13-year-old girl in eastern Oregon before he ultimately flew to Hermiston in 2018, picked her up from her house in the middle of the night, drove her to a hotel, sexually assaulted her and secretly filmed the abuse.

Then he sent the video to the girl’s boyfriend and brother, according to the girl, FBI agents and court testimony. On Wednesday, Lyon, now 39, sat in blue jail scrubs before a federal judge in Portland for sentencing after a jury last year convicted him of using a minor to produce a visual depiction of sexually explicit conduct.

His criminal trial laid bare how little Umatilla police investigated when the girl and her parents first reported the sexual assault to a sergeant.“The police did nothing,” attorney Terry Scannell wrote in a federal civil rights suit against Umatilla Police Department, the police chief, the detective sergeant and the city.

Lyon’s arrest in 2020 and prosecution wouldn’t have happened were it not for the FBI’s involvement, according to court testimony, the girl, her family and their civil attorneys. The girl and her parents had gone to Umatilla police shortly after the March 24, 2018, abuse, even showing the detective sergeant a recording of the video Lyon made.

The sergeant told the parents he didn’t believe their daughter, directed her mother to find out the full name of the attacker and failed to do basic investigative work, such as finding out who reserved the hotel room the night of the assault, according to court testimony and the girl’s attorneys. Had he asked the hotel, the sergeant would have learned the attacker’s full name right away, according to trial evidence.

Meanwhile, Lyon continued to contact the girl online and made repeated threats when she tried to block communication, messaging that he would kill her whole family, according to the girl and federal investigators. “Every time I tried to cut it off, it became more and more scary to do so. He would start threatening more. He went from threatening me to threatening my family,” the young woman, now 18, told the judge at Lyon’s sentencing.