Slain influencer Sara Gilson’s estranged husband had been charged with lewd molestation of a minor when she branded him a pedophile on TikTok two weeks before he killed her.
Jeremiah “Shawn” Duffey, 48, shot the 43-year-old hairstylist and beauty maven and then himself last week in a murder-suicide as police in Owasso, Oklahoma, rushed to respond to a child’s 911 call.
Duffey’s ex-wife said she was shocked at the killings but not surprised because both she and Gilson knew he was capable of violence, she told TMZ. Likewise, Gilson’s ex-husband, Lyle Landers, had been urging the mother of his two children to leave Duffey for years.
Gilson had obtained an emergency order of protection against Duffey on June 10 after learning that the mother of a 15-year-old girl on the youth basketball team he coached had filed a molestation complaint on behalf of her daughter. Another coach had caught Duffey kissing and fondling the teen and told her parents, who reported it to the Owasso Police Department and obtained their own order of protection, The Oklahoman reported at the time.
Duffey was also being investigated in other states, since he had allegedly pursued the girl while the team was on the road.
The girl told her mother that Duffey had sent her inappropriate messages, invited her to his hotel room during a team trip and given her money so she wouldn’t say anything, The Oklahoman reported. Duffey fled upon being discovered with the girl, and Owasso police had been looking for him.
Meanwhile, the Oklahoma case had been referred to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Tulsa in accordance with the Federal Major Crimes Act. Federal authorities have jurisdiction over major crimes committed in Indian Country. Owasso lies within the Cherokee Nation, and Duffey belonged to the Osage Nation.
“Our hands were kind of tied after that,” Owasso Police Department spokesman Captain Nick Boatman told the Daily News.
It was not clear Monday where the molestation complaint stood the time of Gilson’s murder. A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office said only that “we cannot provide any information regarding the existence of any potential evidence or ongoing investigations,” in a statement to the Daily News, neither confirming nor denying whether the complaint about Duffey had been referred there or acted upon.