GREENEVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — A Tennessee man accused in lawsuits of drugging and sexually assaulting dozens of women while police deliberately botched investigations into him has been convicted of producing child sexual abuse images. Jurors found Sean Williams guilty Thursday of three federal counts related to the images of a 9-month-old, a 4-year-old and a 7-year-old. A police report says an officer at Western Carolina University last year found Williams in his car with thousands of images of child sex abuse, along with photos and videos of him assaulting 52 unconscious women. Sentencing is set for February. Three lawsuits separately accuse Johnson City police of failing to properly investigate evidence that Williams drugged and raped women. The city and the officers named in the lawsuits have denied wrongdoing.

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GREENEVILLE, Tenn. (AP) – A Tennessee man who is charged in drug trials and sexually assaulting dozens of women while the police deliberately botched their investigations into him, he was convicted on Thursday of producing child sexual abuse images.

Sean Williams, 53, faces a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years in prison and up to 30 years in prison on each of the three counts in the federal indictment. Sentencing is set for February 24.

According to a police report, a Western Carolina University campus police officer found Williams asleep in his car last year. A search of his vehicle turned up cocaine, methamphetamine, approximately $100,000 in cash and digital storage devices with more than 5,000 images of child sexual abuse. Williams also had photos and videos showing him sexually assaulting at least 52 women in his Johnson City apartment while they were in an “obvious state of unconsciousness.”

Jurors in federal court in Greeneville on Thursday found Williams guilty of all three counts related to the images of a 9-month-old boy, a 4-year-old girl and a 7-year-old girl. Prosecutors said Williams also raped the children’s mothers while they were unconscious, and that there are also pictures and videos of them. Williams took the sexually explicit photos of one child in 2008 and the other two on separate occasions in 2020, all in his apartment, prosecutors said.

The mothers testified at trial, but Williams did not. He has not yet been charged with sexually assaulting any of the dozens of women.

Williams also faces charges in Tennessee, including child rape, aggravated sexual assault of a person under 13 and, specifically, aggravated sexual exploitation of a minor. And in a federal court in North Carolina, he is charged with possession of child sexual abuse images and illegal drugs.

In October 2023, Williams escaped from a van that was taking him from the Kentucky Laurel County Detention Center to the Greeneville courthouse for a hearing. Authorities caught him in Florida more than a month after he escaped. A jury sentenced him in July of escape, for which he faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison. Sentencing on that charge is scheduled for February.

Separated, three federal lawsuits accused the Johnson City Police Department of refusing to properly investigate evidence that Williams drugged and raped women in their East Tennessee community for years. Those lawsuits, which do not name Williams as a defendant, were filed by a former federal prosecutor; nine women listed as Jane Does 1-9; and another woman individually. One of them claims Williams paid off the police to obstruct investigations into allegations of sexual assault against him.

The first trial in the federal lawsuits is scheduled to begin in August 2025.

The city has denied the corruption allegations, as have the officers named in the lawsuits. The parties are expected to depose Williams in at least one of those lawsuits.

Williams said The Tennessean he was framed by law enforcement to cover up a wider public corruption scandal.

The former prosecutor’s lawsuit alleges that police deliberately botched an effort to arrest Williams on a federal ammunition charge in April 2021, allowing him to flee. He was on the run from that charge when he was arrested on the campus of Western Carolina University two years later. The city countered that it took five months to get an indictment when police requested one in 2020.

At least a half-dozen names in the women’s video files matched the first names on a list labeled “Rape” that Johnson City officers found in his apartment, a police statement said.

Faced with public criticism, Johnson City ordered an external investigation into how officers handled sexual assault investigations in the summer of 2022. In November 2022, the US Department of Justice and the FBI opened a federal investigation into sex trafficking.

The results of the city’s external inquiry, published in 2023, found that the police carried out inconsistent, ineffective and incomplete investigations; it was based on inadequate records management; had insufficient training and policies; and sometimes showed gender stereotypes and biases.

The city said it began improving the department’s performance even before the findings were released, including following the district attorney’s new investigative protocol and creating a “comfortable space” for victim interviews.

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