Brian Lee ChastainProsecutors have declined to prosecute a Catoosa County man whose child molestation case was directly tied to Detective Freddie Roden’s resignation last year.
Lookout Mountain Judicial Circuit Assistant District Attorney Alan Norton signed an order Thursday agreeing not to prosecute Brian Lee Chastain, who faced charges of aggravated sexual battery, aggravated child molestation and incest. Chastain’s attorney, McCracken Poston, said the order became final today.
“Our District Attorneys Office does not ever shy away from aggressively prosecuting these cases, even questionable ones,” Poston said in a statement. “So it says much that this case ended short of a jury trial.”
Norton and District Attorney Herbert “Buzz” Franklin did not immediately return a call seeking comment.
The Catoosa County Sheriff’s Office arrested Chastain on allegations that he had sex with a teenage girl. But the detective on the case, Freddie Roden, later admitted to having an affair with a key witness in the case, according to an internal affairs file.
The witness also happened to be married to Chastain at the time. Roden told Sheriff Gary Sisk about the affair in September 2015, according to the file. He resigned in August 2017, days after Sisk re-assigned him away from working cases on crimes against children.
Sisk has never publicly said why he re-assigned Roden two years after the internal affairs investigation.
In a release, Poston said he planned to use that relationship to discredit the prosecution’s case against Chastain. He said he feared “the relationship blinded the detective.”