It took the feds to come down on the Wyandotte County sheriff’s son
On June 16, an off-duty Kansas City, Kansas, police officer thought that he recognized someone at the Sprint retail store in Wyandotte County’s Village West development. The officer quickly verified his suspicion: He’d spotted a 35-year-old man with 13 outstanding arrest warrants.
When on-duty police arrived to arrest the man, they found in his possession a loaded .38-caliber Grendel pistol and some methamphetamine.
An agent with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was interested in this arrest. The man was Dustin Ash, a convicted felon — who had crossed state lines with a gun.
Federal prosecutors charged Ash on June 18 with unlawful possession of a firearm. He remains in federal custody, a magistrate judge having determined that Ash was a flight risk. Those 13 active warrants signal a man with a habit of not showing up for court.
More than a few law-enforcement types in Wyandotte County know Ash on sight. He has been booked into the Wyandotte County Detention Center 13 times since 2013 on charges including drug possession, auto theft and firearms violations, according to county records. Municipal-court records show that he was cited by police at least six other times between 2010 and 2013. For all his apparent transgressions, however, Ash seems to have avoided serious prosecution and jail time since 2010.
In fact, Ash has appeared in Wyandotte County District Court only in civil cases. There’s no shortage of those on the books, either: eviction, divorce, tax warrants, restraining orders sought by two different women.
It’s worth mentioning that his father is Wyandotte County Sheriff Don Ash, a former KCK police officer who was elected sheriff for the first time in 2009.
In 2010, Dustin Ash was brought to municipal court in KCK on a domestic-battery charge. He was found guilty and sentenced to eight months of probation. That was the last time he was punished, but it was far from his last brush with the law.
Ash’s arrest record since 2010 — the colorful list above plus telephone harassment and possession of stolen property — is conspicuous for its lack of serious court action. Several municipal charges since the 2010 conviction have been dismissed, either because city prosecutors declined prosecution or due to what court records list as “judicial discretion.”
Ash has also been arrested over the years on charges that would have sent him not before a municipal judge but to Wyandotte County District Court. But he hasn’t been criminally prosecuted there, either.
Police records show that Ash was arrested in KCK on April 7, 2013, possessing K-2, an outlawed synthetic version of marijuana, along with drug paraphernalia. He was not charged.
He was arrested on June 26, 2014, for felony possession of a firearm and felony possession of stolen property. In that case, police had pulled over Ash and another man, Brian Knight, at 5100 Parallel Parkway, driving a stolen Honda Pilot. In the car was a .22-caliber Browning handgun. The case was referred to Jerome Gorman, the Wyandotte County District Attorney. His office declined to prosecute that case, the first with Ash’s name on it to reach Gorman’s desk in recent years.
“Maybe a couple guys in a stolen vehicle blaming it on the other,” Gorman says. “Nobody could say, or would say, who stole it.”
Ash hasn’t been as successful at avoiding prosecution in other jurisdictions.
He was arrested on May 11, 2011, for fleeing a traffic stop and hitting a police car in Johnson County. For that, he served 181 days in the Johnson County Detention Center. And in 2000, Ash was charged in Platte County with second-degree robbery. He pleaded guilty and received a five-year prison sentence. (Predating this is a 1999 robbery charge in Wyandotte County, before his dad’s tenure.)
Gorman says Sheriff Ash has never asked his office for leniency on behalf of the junior Ash. “Nothing like that has ever come across me,” he tells The Pitch.
Through a spokeswoman, Sheriff Ash declined to answer questions.
