photo by: Conrad Swanson

Douglas County District Attorney Charles Branson speaks at a news conference, Friday, Sept. 16, 2016.

Douglas County’s top prosecutor wants to know why Shane S. Allen was allowed to violate his probation over and over for more than a year without being called back to court until after he was linked to a woman’s death.

District Attorney Charles Branson told the Journal-World Friday morning that once Allen was sentenced, Community Corrections was in charge of ensuring that court orders for substance abuse and mental health treatment — among other requirements — were carried out.

“They knew going into this supervision that this guy needed to be closely watched and monitored. Why was that not being done?” Branson said. “I demand an explanation.”

Branson said he planned a formal inquiry to Community Corrections about the “failure to supervise” Allen.

Allen has “serious issues” that prompted the DA to demand a detailed plea and sentencing agreement before he was released on probation.

“I am baffled at the fact that — despite a carefully crafted sentence in this case — he was allowed to miss over five meetings with his intensive supervision officer. He was allowed to not report for over a month between February and March of 2018, allowed to test positive three times for methamphetamine, allowed to miss his mental health treatment nine times and be unsuccessfully discharged from his program before a probation violation was ever filed in his case,” Branson said.

photo by: Douglas County Sheriff’s Office

Shane Steven Allen

Pam Weigand is director of the Douglas County Department of Criminal Justice Services, which has overseen adult community corrections since the beginning of this year.

On Friday afternoon, she said she was waiting for the DA’s letter and meeting with her staff to get the information she needed to answer his questions.

“We’re, at this point, just pulling together information,” she said.

Weigand declined to answer additional questions about Allen’s case for the Journal-World.

Allen, 32, of Lawrence, has been on probation since December 2016, when he was convicted in Douglas County District Court of felony aggravated battery for beating a woman he met on the social media dating app Tinder. Under a plea agreement, kidnapping and several other charges were dismissed.

In that case, the victim told police that Allen picked her up at her University of Kansas sorority house and took her to his trailer, where she smoked marijuana and planned to spend the night. But she said Allen instead held her against her will and repeatedly beat her for nearly a week — at times in a “crazed” state from what she believed was methamphetamine use — before finally taking her home.

A story published Tuesday by the Journal-World reported that Lawrence police are investigating the recent suspicious death of a woman under similar circumstances.

Sabrina Frock, 27, of Brookfield, Mo., met Allen on meetme.com and was visiting him at the same Lawrence trailer home when — after being with him several days — she was mortally injured on April 29 of this year, her mother, Denise Slaughter, told the newspaper. Frock underwent surgery for a severe head injury, but she never regained consciousness and died May 1 at the University of Kansas Hospital in Kansas City, Kan.

photo by: Contributed photo

Sabrina Frock

No one is in custody or has been charged with crimes in connection with the death, and that investigation remains ongoing, police said this week.

Branson emphasized that his office is not involved in the police department’s death investigation at this time and that he is not alleging wrongdoing related to it.

“That remains to be seen when the investigation is done,” Branson said. “But what I am concerned about is that we have somebody on intense supervision and it appears they were not supervised.”

Branson said his office was notified that the death investigation was underway around the date Frock died.

He said his office did not know about Allen’s previous probation violations until almost a month later, just prior to May 29, when Allen’s probation supervisor filed an affidavit with the court outlining a string of probation violations that had allegedly been occurring for more than year.

When that affidavit was updated with more allegations Wednesday morning — including that Allen had used meth as recently as the previous day — Judge Sally Pokorny issued a bench warrant for Allen’s arrest, and he was taken into custody after a brief hearing at the courthouse that afternoon.

The intensive supervision probation officer currently assigned to Allen and who filed those affidavits, Richard Morris, did not immediately respond to messages from the Journal-World on Friday.

Allen’s attorneys in the 2016 case and an attorney representing him in court Wednesday did not answer additional questions about his current situation this week.

Allen, whose bond was set at $20,000, remained in jail Friday, according to jail records. His next court hearing is scheduled for Wednesday.

Branson said that if Allen contests allegations that he violated his probation, then the judge would hear testimony before ruling whether he was guilty. Then, Branson said, the judge could choose to order sanctions ranging from sending him to prison to reinstating his probation.

June 12, 2018 — Lawrence police investigating woman’s death; her mother says she was visiting man who was previously convicted in kidnapping and beating case