The toll of trauma: part two

(Editor’s note: This is the second of a three-part series covering sexual assault cases handled in Gunnison District Court. The next, and final installment will appear in the Feb. 15 edition of the Times.)

Highway 92 stretches into the rumpled horizon of western Colorado, corralled from the arid landscape only by telephone poles and cattle fences. Along this road lies the town of Crawford, which offers passers-by a Methodist church, a humble public library, an uncrowded cemetery and a lone gas station. 

For those who call it home, Crawford can feel insulated from the turmoil of the outside world. Generations of farmers and ranchers occupy boxy homes on a hill scabbed with sagebrush. It’s a town where last names matter. A patron at the post office knows one’s grandmother.

But when an allegation of sexual assault emerges, the comforting smallness of rural life can turn sour. Rumors circulate as truths, whispered across every dinner table and slick bar top. For Crawford local Jazmyn Hart, it’s what pushed her to leave her childhood home. 

At the age of 15, Jazmyn was sexually assaulted by a long-time family friend, according to an arrest affidavit filed in early 2021. Her case dragged on for nearly five years. Her assailant Luke Chesnik, 37 at the time, would later plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge of sexual assault, part of a plea deal that offered probation and no jail time.

Jazmyn eventually left the Western Slope in search of a new home, a new job, a place where nobody knew her name. She battled severe endometriosis — which her doctors attribute to the assault, according to her mother Jessica Hart. Her case was so severe that it required surgery in the spring of 2019. 

In July of 2023, on the day Chesnik was sentenced, Jazmyn implored the court to recognize the damage the process had caused her. 

“Please tell me how justice was served when he wouldn’t even be on probation for as long as I have been going to court,” she said. “Probation is not what makes him accountable for the hell he has put me through. This nightmare is, and has been, in my life for the last five years.”

She stood at the podium, addressing the judge, the deputy district attorney and her assailant. She was trembling, but her voice was clear, steady.  “I now understand why so many women do not come forward.”

‘Uncle Luke’

Growing up, Jazmyn lived with her three siblings and parents in a modest home in Crawford. A large box elder tree shades the porch, where the family lounges during the summer months. She worked odd jobs during high school: housekeeping, dishwashing and waiting tables at the local restaurant, the North Fork Boardwalk.

Chesnik was always in the periphery of Jazmyn’s childhood memories, present at family barbecues and athletic games. Her father, John Hart, worked with Chesnik for years at the Elk Creek Mine north of Crawford, before it closed in the mid 2010s. Friendships forge quickly in a job that is brutal and thankless, so Chesnik became something like a family member, Jessica said. The Hart children called him “Uncle Luke.” 

One evening during the summer of 2018, Jazmyn asked her mother if she could go on a campout outside town. Her best friend and sister were busy that night, and her parents were sick. Jessica, not keen to send her middle daughter out alone, let Jazmyn go only because Chesnik agreed to take her. He’s a longtime family friend, she thought. He will protect her.

But according to the arrest affidavit, Chesnik instead “supplied her with alcohol to the extent that she passed out” and sexually assaulted her in his truck. The Times reached out to Chesnik’s lawyer Jon Schumacher, but did not receive a reply by press time. 

During an early interview with a victim advocate in October of 2018, Jazmyn said she woke up the next morning next to Chesnik in his car, half-naked and physically sore with only fragments of memory from the night before, according to a Gunnison County Sheriff’s Office report. She got out of the truck, and started walking away. He soon pulled up behind her and told her to get in the truck, and he’d drive her home.

Three days later she told her sister Jade, who pleaded with Jazmyn to tell their parents. “Uncle Luke” could no longer be trusted, she said. It would take Jazmyn another three months to tell her mother what had happened, on a chilly October evening. She was balled up on her bed in her room, weeping.

“I was worried about the relationship between everybody,” Jazmyn said. “I wish I would have told them sooner, it would have saved a lot of headache. But I just didn't want anybody to ever know. I tried to keep it under the rug.”

Her mother, stunned, walked down the stairs and told her husband. John later called Chesnik, his friend of nearly three decades, asking him to explain. But Chesnik sat on the other end of the line, silent, before John hung up, Jessica said. The next day, she called the Delta County Sheriff's Office to report the assault. The case was later transferred to Gunnison County because it occurred just miles within its boundaries.

Jazmyn and Gunnison local Celeste Hendry (see part one of this series in the Feb. 1 edition of the Times) lived over a hundred miles apart with timelines that barely overlapped. But they are bound by a familiar thread that runs through the justice system in Gunnison County, and in the country as a whole: what is legal is rarely fair, and going to court for sexual assault can prolong trauma, drain victims of hope and offer little justice for the crimes that have scarred their bodies.

Unanswered calls

Jazmyn was first interviewed by Gunnison County Sheriff's Office Detective Mathew Taramarcaz in October of 2018. It had been just over three months since the assault. The investigation carried on, and in August 2019, after months of phone calls and interviews, the district attorney’s office advised Taramarcaz that there was likely not enough evidence to file charges.

In Crawford, Jazmyn’s grades at school had slipped, her interest in softball waned. Her boyfriend at the time explained to detective Bob Summer that her buoyant and outgoing personality had withered, according to the sheriff’s report. She stopped smiling at school and “shut herself away from everyone.” Friends noticed she no longer hugged Chesnik, and instead pulled away when he approached her. 

Before the investigation closed, Taramarcaz left the sheriff’s office. When he did, many cases on his desk, including Jazmyn’s, sat collecting dust for eight months. In June of 2020, Summer picked up the case file and noticed a number of “contradictions” in the previous investigation, he stated in the sheriff's report. 

Summer decided to reach back out to the Harts. That same month, Jessica filed a complaint with the Colorado Victim Rights Act (VRA) Subcommittee — the first of two she would submit. In the complaint, she detailed a spotty record of communication from the sheriff’s office during the nearly two years that had passed. Many of her calls and emails went unanswered, she wrote.

The committee ultimately found that no violation had occurred. Jazmyn’s victim advocate, who offers emotional and logistical support through the investigation and court proceedings, “went above and beyond,” the ruling stated. But, it also acknowledged lapses in replies from the sheriff’s office, making the communication “less than adequate.”

“Every one of them at some point [said], ‘This is just the way that things are done,’” Jessica told the Times, referring to both the sheriff’s and district attorney’s offices, “It felt like it was a way bigger deal to us than it appears to be to any of them.”

Gunnison County Sheriff Adam Murdie, who was elected to the position in late 2022, told the Times that the office takes some responsibility for letting Jazmyn's case languish. 

"There were some unfinished cases on the desk," Murdie said. “They should have been picked up and run with at that time."

Imperfect evidence

Jazmyn would eventually move from Crawford to Wyoming, to escape the distress that followed her home each day. She started therapy and found a secure job: driving a pilot vehicle for the enormous semis that rumble along I-25 and I-80.

Still, nightmares plagued her. She’d snap awake in the middle of the night and lie in bed riddled with anxiety before slipping back to sleep. But those dreams soon became flashbacks, and she recalled more from that night: the warmth of the heaters blowing on her face, the chugging sounds of the diesel engine. 

Jazmyn said that when she first spoke to detectives in 2018, not only did she not remember everything, but she obscured some details out of fear and shame. She was in a “weird position,” she stated to detectives. She knew what Chesnik did was wrong, but did not want him to get in trouble. 

In December of 2020, after Summer’s additional investigation, the district attorney’s office filed a charge of “contributing to the delinquency of a minor” against Chesnik. The arrest warrant was issued just a couple months later. But, like in Celeste’s case, it took law enforcement over a year to locate him. Immediately after the assault, he moved to Utah. He was finally arrested in Utah in March of 2022 with a bond set at $5,000.

But just a month after Chesnik was located, Jazmyn called the district attorney’s office, stating she wanted to speak further. When she was reinterviewed by Summer and detective Skye Wells, she offered an account of her assault that included more, and slightly different, details.  

As that summer night back in 2018 grew weary, Chesnik told her it was late and they needed to go home, Jazmyn said to detectives. She got in his truck. Instead of taking her home, he drove her down a U.S. Forest Service road to a remote, wooded spot. There, he sexually assaulted her, according to the sheriff’s report. 

She recalled trying to push out of his grasp and his multiple attempts to “pin” her arms to the seat, according to the sheriff’s report. She twisted away and rolled out of the truck, grabbing her pants and bra before rushing away into the early morning light. She remembers shivering as she walked, gravel and twigs pricked her bare feet. Chesnik soon drove after her, telling her to get in the truck and he would drive her home. 

Jazmyn said she was initially afraid to tell anyone and figured she could just live with what happened, Wells wrote in the sheriff’s report. Since the assault, everyone had looked at her in pity, and she didn’t want it to get worse. 

“I felt so embarrassed,” Jazmyn told the Times. “I mean, I was 15. We don't really like to talk about sex to older people.”

Disclosing more or contradictory information at a later time is a well-documented phenomenon in research covering sexual assault, said Amy Kirschbaum, executive director of Project Hope of the Gunnison Valley. Project Hope is Gunnison’s only nonprofit devoted to providing confidential assistance to victims of domestic violence, sexual assault or human trafficking.

“Because of the way different people deal with trauma, there is no cookie cutter answer for how a trauma is going to play out,” Kirchbaum said. “Some people aren't able to process it right away, and that's why, seemingly, stories change.”

But in the eyes of the court, Jazmyn’s story was now weaker. Sexual assault cases are already difficult to prosecute: the crime often occurs in a private setting, between two people with no witnesses, said Deputy District Attorney Darren Struble, who handled Jazmyn’s case for the last year. It’s then complicated by the passage of time, lack of physical evidence and changes in a victim’s account of events. And, Jazmyn had been drinking that night, with alcohol Chesnik supplied.

When she got home that morning, she threw away the pants she’d had on during the assault. She didn’t go to the hospital to have a rape kit done. It took her days to tell her sister, and months more to tell her parents. By then, the best evidence was already lost. 

A final blow 

Still, in April of 2022, the district attorney's office amended the complaint to include sexual assault and sexual assault on a child by one in a position of trust—both felony charges. But those charges didn’t stick. In May of 2023, nearly five years after the assault, Struble offered a plea deal that included a misdemeanor charge of sexual assault and contributing to the delinquency of a minor, also a misdemeanor. 

Chesnik accepted and was sentenced to four years of sex-offender specific probation, and served no additional jail time beyond 11 days in a Utah jail after being picked up on the arrest warrant for Jazmyn’s case. He was required to pay $7.05 in restitution to the district attorney’s office.

At a sentencing hearing in July, Struble said he acknowledges that the Harts feel “let down by the system,” according to a court transcript. Jessica said that, in her family’s opinion, the plea agreement accomplished nothing: It did not obtain justice for Jazmyn, punish Chesnik or keep the community safe. 

She beseeched chief District Judge J. Steven Patrick to deem the plea inappropriate. But he accepted the plea, stating that the standards for rejecting it were not met, according to the transcript. Jessica winced, pulling Jazmyn close to her on a hard wooden bench in the gallery.

“Every step of the way, I kept telling myself that it's going be worth it in the end. We just have to keep fighting,” Jessica told the Times. “And it absolutely wasn't.”

Project Hope can be reached at 970-275-1193 for 24/7 for support with sexual assault, domestic violence and more.

(Abby Harrison can be contacted at 970.641.1414 or abby@gunnisontimes.com.)