AURORA |A former bus driver with the Cherry Creek School District will have to register as a sex offender and spend 90 nights in jail after being caught in a sting operation trying to have sex with a 14-year-old girl, according to the 18th Judicial District Attorney’s Office.
An Arapahoe County District Court judge on Feb. 23 sentenced Christopher Doughty, 35, to 90 days in jail and eight years of sex offender intensive supervised probation, court records show. Work release was authorized as a part of the sentence, meaning Doughty will likely be allowed to leave jail during work hours on weekdays before returning each night.
Doughty in December pleaded guilty to the felony charge of sexual exploitation of a child, according to the local DA’s office.
Aurora police arrested Doughty May 15 in the parking lot of a Starbucks at East Mississippi Avenue and Interstate 225, according to an arrest affidavit filed against him. He later admitted to driving to the location in his 2015 Nissan Versa to meet and have sex with a girl he thought was 14 years old.
The day before, a detective from the Lakewood Police Department contacted Doughty using a fake profile on the anonymous messaging application Whisper, according to the affidavit. The detective was working with Aurora authorities as part of a metro-area sting operation coordinated by a statewide task force.
Over the course of about five hours on May 14, Doughty exchanged sexually explicit messages with the detective and eventually agreed to meet what he thought was a teenage girl the following day to “go as far as she wanted,” according to the affidavit.
The detective set up the profile of a 36- to 44-year-old female using the pseudonym “CrisT,” but quickly informed Doughty, who was using the handle “Cloud_the,” the user was in fact 14.
Doughty nevertheless continued the conversation, saying “Ur cute and all but I could go to prison for a long time … So If anything would happen, we definitely can’t tell anyone,” according to court documents.
He then bragged about making “women have multiple orgasms,” offered to perform oral sex on the fictitious teen and asked for her bra size.
Later in the conversation, “Doughty asked if she was a cop or ‘some guy.’ Det. Griffith said he was not a cop or some guy,” according to the affidavit.
Once in custody, Doughty admitted to attempting to meet a girl he understood to be 14 years old for sex. He told police “he knows what he did is wrong and did not know what he was thinking,” according to court documents.
He then told police he thought he was a sex addict, and “he thought he was acting out because he was not having sex at home.”
As part of the supervised probation portion of his sentence, Doughty will be prohibited from contacting anyone under the age of 18, using drugs or alcohol, and possessing pornography, among a slew of other stipulations, according to the Colorado Legal Defense Group.
Doughty drove multiple bus routes for the Cherry Creek School District from Aug. 21, 2017 until last May, district officials said in a statement issued after Doughty was arrested.
He was briefly placed on administrative leave after he was arrested and fired from the local school district on May 29, according to Abbe Smith, spokeswoman for Cherry Creek.
An updated message to Cherry Creek parents with children who rode Doughty’s buses is forthcoming, Smith said.
Doughty had been out of custody since posting a $7,500 bond May 22. He was scheduled to report to the Arapahoe County Detention Center to begin his sentence at 8:30 a.m. Feb. 24., according to court records.