photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Wyatt Farrow, left, appears with his defense attorney, Cooper Overstreet, on Friday, Sept. 5, 2025, in Douglas County District Court.

“This case makes no sense,” a defense attorney told the jury Thursday in a case of a man accused of aggravated criminal sodomy against two teens, including his own brother.

On Friday, the jury appeared to agree, at least partially, delivering not-guilty verdicts on the most serious charges against the defendant, Wyatt Farrow, and finding him guilty of only two misdemeanors.

The outcome produced sobs of relief in the courtroom — to the extent that Judge Amy Hanley asked Farrow’s supporters to “control” their emotions. Farrow eventually turned around and hugged his girlfriend, who had been the sole defense witness in the trial.

Farrow, who was 19 at the time of the February 2022 incident, had faced two felony counts of aggravated criminal sodomy, two counts of furnishing alcohol to a minor and one count of hosting minors consuming alcohol.

The jury of eight women and four men found him guilty only of furnishing alcohol to a teen girl, who was the other alleged victim in the case, and unlawfully hosting minors consuming alcohol.

The jury began deliberating at 2:30 p.m. Thursday and returned its decision at 1 p.m. Friday.

As the Journal-World reported, the state had argued that Farrow had planned an illicit alcohol-fueled sexual encounter between his little brother and a girl, both 17, during a sleepover at the brothers’ family home, including sexual “coaching” from Wyatt that resulted in both teens being sexually victimized.

The defense, describing the charges as “madness” and the state’s case as “filled with reasonable doubt,” had argued that the incident was nothing more than Farrow’s innocent attempt to help his little brother along with a first kiss. Anything that happened between the two younger teens at the February 2022 sleepover was entirely consensual and up to them, defense attorney Cooper Overstreet said in closing arguments, likening the events of that night to routine behavior among college students on any given night in Lawrence.

“There were two people in the bedroom that night, but Wyatt Farrow is the person who faces all the consequences,” Overstreet said. “Wyatt Farrow did not lay a single finger on (the two teens), yet he stands charged with aggravated criminal sodomy of both of them.”

The case was unusual in that the younger brother, Everett, was originally charged with a sex crime against the girl himself, but then was named as a victim and given immunity by the Douglas County District Attorney’s Office to testify at Wyatt’s trial. At trial Everett testified that he was drunk that evening but definitely not a victim, that all the sexual activity was consensual and that he did not believe his older brother had done anything wrong.

The teen girl, on the other hand, said that she had consented to nothing beyond a kiss but had — somewhat mysteriously, given her patchy memory — wound up in Wyatt’s bed being sexually assaulted by Everett as Wyatt came in and out of the room three times, speaking to Everett and at one point supplying a vibrator for him to use.

Wyatt’s girlfriend, the teen girl’s then-best friend, testified that she told Wyatt to take the sex toy to the teens to “speed up” what she said was a consensual, but too long, encounter. The woman also said Wyatt, who did not testify in his own defense, recorded a video of the teen girl’s statements after the incident for “protection” and so that everyone’s story would “be the same.”

In the video, played for the jury, the teen girl appeared to be highly intoxicated, but the defense suggested that she had only pretended to be drunk out of fear that she might otherwise be charged with a crime. In the video she is heard asking, “Oh my God, did I rape Everett?” — a question that Overstreet said had started “a chain reaction” that led to Wyatt being on trial.

The girl’s apparent inebriation was an issue in the trial because she herself had testified that she had only consumed one, at most two, shots of vodka the entire evening. A KBI toxicologist testified that a blood draw from her hours after the event had indicated zero alcohol in her bloodstream.

The boys’ father, Anthony Farrow, was convicted last year of hosting the minors as they consumed alcohol in the family home. Wyatt had sent him a text asking him to furnish alcohol, but the father apparently played no further role in the evening.

Sentencing for Wyatt’s misdemeanors is set for Nov. 5.

Friday’s acquittal was the fourth for the DA’s office in the past eight weeks. On Aug. 8, a jury found a KU student not guilty of rape and aggravated criminal sodomy. On July 10, a jury found that the state had not proved its case against a convicted drug dealer who was accused in a Lawrence teen’s fentanyl death; and on July 31, a jury acquitted a man who was accused of an aggravated assault with an ax near a homeless camp on the Kansas River levee trail.

This story may be updated.