photo by: Douglas County Sheriff's Office

Jared L. Wheeler

A man who was tried for rape in Lawrence and eventually pleaded to a less severe nonsexual crime will now have to serve a jail sentence of more than a year for violating his probation.

Jared L. Wheeler, 24, was originally granted probation with an underlying 13-month jail sentence and one year of post-release supervision after he pleaded no contest to a felony count of aggravated battery in January 2017. But he violated the probation terms when he was convicted last year of two felonies and five misdemeanors in Oklahoma, Douglas County District Court Judge Amy Hanley said during a probation hearing on Friday.

Hanley revoked Wheeler’s probation and sentenced him to serve the full underlying sentence with 88 days, which is almost three months, already credited to the sentence as time served. She said additional time would likely be credited toward the sentence for jail time Wheeler served in Oklahoma, but the court did not have that information available at the time of the hearing.

Before his probation was revoked, Wheeler testified that he was a changed man and requested that his probation be reinstated. The catalyst of his change was the birth of his daughter, who was born exactly a year prior to the court hearing on Aug. 2, 2018, he said. Her birth inspired him to be a responsible father because he became the primary provider for her and the child’s mother, he said, and he also began a second attempt at addiction treatment program in late 2018.

Hanley said she did not find his argument compelling because of his testimony about his first stint in a treatment program with the Comanche Nation in Oklahoma during the first half of 2018. In his testimony, Wheeler said his first attempt was unsuccessful because “those guys” were just “going through the motions.” He left the treatment program in July 2018 after about five months there, without finishing the treatment, he said.

Hanley said she was unconvinced by Wheeler’s arguments because he appeared to be putting the blame of his unsuccessful recovery on the treatment center.

“Treatment begins with you,” Hanley told Wheeler. “I don’t think you understand that.”

Hanley said she could revoke Wheeler’s probation on his conviction of other crimes alone, but she said she was also doing so because his release from jail would jeopardize public safety and would be detrimental to his own welfare.

Wheeler’s sentence stems from a case in Lawrence where he — along with his then-roommate at Haskell Indian Nations University — was charged with raping a female Haskell student in the dorm room where the two men lived in 2014.

Wheeler’s trial ended with a hung jury in June 2016. He later pleaded no contest to a single felony count of aggravated battery and, in January 2017, was sentenced to 60 days in jail and two years on probation.

At Wheeler’s sentencing, the victim said she still suffered nightmares but was moving forward. She and her parents called the conviction too light.

“He should have gotten more than what was given to him,” she said, according to previous Journal-World coverage.

Wheeler called the case a “wake-up call” and told the judge it had motivated him to take “positive steps.”

After serving his jail time, Wheeler moved and had his probation transferred to Oklahoma, where he violated it in a number of ways, he admitted during an early July hearing in Douglas County District Court.

In 2017 and 2018, Wheeler was arrested and charged in three separate cases in Oklahoma, an affidavit filed by his probation supervisor here says. Alleged crimes included assault and battery on police on more than one occasion, peeping tom, public intoxication, possession of a controlled substance and possession of drug paraphernalia.

In the 2014 rape case, Wheeler’s roommate and co-defendant, Galen Satoe, had two trials, but jurors failed to agree on a verdict in both. The DA’s office decided not to pursue a third trial.

Defense attorneys for both men cast the encounter as a consensual threesome at their trials.