photo by: Kansas Department of Corrections

Jimmy Lee Hadl

Updated at 3:50 p.m. Tuesday, July 28, 2026

A 50-year-old man was charged Tuesday with a felony after passersby accused him of masturbating in public in downtown Lawrence.

The man, Jimmy Lee Hadl, of Lawrence, was arrested early Monday evening at Ninth and Vermont streets. According to the spokeswoman for the Lawrence Police Department, Laura McCabe, someone complained that a man was fondling himself in plain view on a public bench.

A police officer found the man on the bench “without a shirt, with his hands in his pants, a lubricating substance on his hands, and lotion on the bench next to him,” McCabe said.

The man denied that he had been masturbating. The officer believed that he had probable cause to submit an affidavit for misdemeanor lewd and lascivious behavior, but then discovered other people had witnessed the man’s actions, including a juvenile, which increased the severity of the alleged crime to a felony.

The minor witness is listed as having been born in 2012.

Hadl was then arrested and taken to the Douglas County Jail.

Hadl has had numerous runs-ins with the law. According to the Kansas Department of Corrections, he has convictions for forgery, theft and fleeing and eluding. He also has multiple ongoing cases in Douglas County for criminal damage to property, as well as previous convictions for the same.

A prosecutor told Judge Blake Glover Tuesday afternoon that the latest incident occurred while Hadl was on probation for a misdemeanor offense. She said Hadl has a criminal history score of “at least a B” on a scale of A to I, with A being the worst for the purposes of the Kansas Sentencing Guidelines. The state also indicated that Hadl had four previous failures to appear in court and requested a $5,000 cash or surety bond, which Glover granted.

Hadl was given a court-appointed attorney and ordered to appear in court on Wednesday.