BOSSIER CITY, La. — A former Louisiana police officer accused of possessing child pornography and of filming himself repeatedly sexually abusing his dog has been sentenced to serve 20 years in prison.
Terry Yetman, 41, of Minden, pleaded guilty in August to five counts of sexual abuse of an animal and one count of possession of child porn. KTBS in Shreveport reported that each sex abuse charge carries four years in prison, to run consecutively for a total of 20 years.
The child porn charge carries another 20 years, to run concurrently with the sex abuse sentence.
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Yetman, who was a Bossier City police officer at the time of his arrest, is also required to register as a sex offender, KTBS reported. Dozens of other charges against the former officer have been dropped as part of his plea agreement with prosecutors.
Yetman was initially arrested in December 2018 and charged with 40 counts of sexually abusing his dog, which the news station identified as a Belgian Malinois named Boss. The dog, a retired police K-9, was confiscated by authorities and placed in an animal rescue in Texas.
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The child porn charges were tacked on in April 2019 after Yetman, who once worked as a K-9 officer, was identified through a child porn investigation targeting another former law enforcement officer.
Court documents obtained by KTBS indicate that the original target, at Yetman’s request, provided Yetman with a dirty pair of underwear belonging to the target’s 7-year-old daughter. Yetman then took the underwear to the homes of other alleged sexual predators.
Images of child porn were also found in Yetman’s Apple iCloud account, as were images of him abusing Boss.
Yetman joined the Bossier City Police Department in 2014. Before that, he had worked at other nearby law enforcement agencies.
Just two months before his arrest, Yetman was honored for his “outstanding effort over the year to champion the protective rights of domestic violence victims and their families,” according to the Bossier Parish Sheriff’s Office. He was a recipient of the 2018 Trey Hutchison Award, which is named for a Bossier City policeman killed in August 2004 as he responded to a domestic violence call.
Yetman was placed on administrative leave in November 2018 and was later terminated. He has been in the Bossier County Detention Center since his arrest.
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