ASOTIN, WA – A 58-year-old former Clarkston man who has been wanted on rape of a child and drug charges since he fled prosecution for a 2013 case in Asotin County Superior Court has been extradited to Asotin County by U.S. Marshals. Thomas Eugene McDonald, a longtime former Washington State chemical dependency counselor, was arrested in October in Levy County, Florida on out-of-state warrants on two different local cases. Bond was set at $250,000.
“The warrant was executed by one of our deputies who works in our detention center – he’s one of our transport deputies who’s dual-sworn, so he’s a correctional officer and a deputy sheriff. He normally completes these warrant arrests when somebody is in court and they’re taken into custody from court,” Levy County Lt. Scott Tummond told KOZE News.
” I asked our dispatch supervisor to look deeper into the call. It appears the Cedar Key Police Department Chief Jenkins and one of his officers encountered the subject in the City of Cedar Key and discovered he had a warrant. He was detained and transported to our jail where one of our deputies executed the warrant,” Lt. Tummond adds.
McDonald had been released from the Levy County detention center on November 15th and it is believed he was in transport to southeast Washington State since then.
According to an October news release from the Asotin County Sheriff’s Office, an investigation into McDonald began in 2013 after it was discovered he allegedly was supplying cigarettes, drugs, and alcohol to minors in exchange for cash or sexual favors. Another investigation began in early 2015 on a similar incident which had occurred at around the same time in 2013, court records say.
In the first case against McDonald he is charged with five counts of Delivery of a Controlled Substance to a Minor – the first three with a Sexual Motivation enhancement; in the 2015 case, he is charged with one count of Delivery of a Controlled Substance to a Minor with a Sexual Motivation enhancement and one count of Rape of a Child with an enhancement for inducing the minor with a “fee.”
Court records say McDonald had previously been arrested in August 2000 in Uniontown (WA) for 2nd-Degree Rape and other charges related to a case in which he provided drugs to a 15-year-old girl and then sexually assaulted her. Police records also state that he had been acquitted in Snohomish County on eight counts of Rape of a Child in 1985; that same year, four counts of 2nd-Degree Rape were dismissed against him in Whitman County.
He was previously convicted of one count of 3rd-Degree Rape of a Child involving a 15-year-old girl and given a one-year prison sentence, a 2006 Seattle Times article stated, adding that McDonald served eight months in the Whitman County Jail.
McDonald was a longtime registered counselor in Washington State and worked as a “chemical dependency professional” in Pullman at one time, treating court referrals in his own drug-and-alcohol counseling clinic in Pullman.
“As a registered counselor, he also had received two complaints of sexual misconduct and one for unprofessional conduct. The Health Department had dismissed all three,” that Seattle Times article reported.
McDonald was reportedly living in Cedar Key, an island city off the northwest coast of Florida in the Gulf of Mexico when he was arrested this past fall on the Asotin County charges. In 2014, McDonald failed to appear for a court hearing, fled the area, and remained at large until being arrested October 3rd.
According to previous court documents, McDonald allegedly told deputies that he provided marijuana to teenagers “to prevent them from going to the streets and getting hooked on meth.”
A 2013 Probable Cause Affidavit says McDonald told deputies that his wife (Deborah) had a medical marijuana card and that they were in compliance. Deputies located two Mason jars full of marijuana, several digital scales, 27 pills of a muscle relaxer for which there was not a prescription, and other items, the document states.
During the initial investigation, a 15-year-old girl said that she smoked several “bowls” of marijuana with McDonald in July 2013 and after he gave her a white cup with clear liquid to calm a cough, she allegedly lost consciousness. She awakened early the next morning and felt “something was wrong,” the girl reportedly told investigators. The girl went to Tri-State Memorial Hospital a few hours later.
Initially, McDonald denied that he provided the marijuana to the teens, but when he was confronted with his wife’s statements to the contrary, McDonald reportedly admitted that he had and said that he had the permission of some of the kids’ parents “and that some of the kids come and smoke marijuana with their parents.”
“Gene said he is just trying to provide a safe place for kids to smoke marijuana because they are going to smoke it anyway,” according to the initial affidavit.
In 2015, charges against McDonald were amended to include a rape charge. A Probable Cause Affidavit says a female reported that when she was 15-years-old, she was sexually abused by him.
