OREM — Joshua Shumway had a pretty good life.

At age 26, he was a registered nurse working in the internship and orientation program at St. Mark's Hospital. He had good friends and a strong family around him, and was living in his own apartment in Salt Lake County.

He was just about to leave that apartment to head to church on a Sunday in early December 2013, when Roosevelt police detective Pete Butcher arrived at the door with a $500,000 warrant for Shumway's arrest on charges that he'd raped and threatened to kill a patient.

"An allegation as bad as what they leveled against me doesn't leave any part of your life unaltered," Shumway said Monday, looking back on nearly two years of anxiety, fear and loss.

"I do blame the detective and the prosecutor," Shumway said, speaking publicly for the first time since an 8th District Court judge dismissed all charges in the case Friday at the request of Duchesne County prosecutor Grant Charles.

"They should never have filed this, and they never should have pushed forward in the manner they did," Shumway said. "Especially for two years when it became blatantly and obviously clear that something was amiss."

On Monday, Charles stood by his decision to charge Shumway with rape, object rape, forcible sodomy, forcible sex abuse and aggravated assault. The prosecutor still believes Shumway committed the crimes and said he only dismissed the case because Judge Ed Peterson suppressed the alleged victim's identification of Shumway as her attacker.

Case 'dismissed on a technicality'

"This case was dismissed on a technicality," Charles said, while also acknowledging that the 24-hour police investigation that preceded Shumway's arrest "could have been more thorough."

"I think there was a rush due to the fact that (Shumway) was working in a hospital and still had access to patients," the prosecutor said.

In a blistering 33-page ruling handed down in June, Peterson blasted Butcher for the detective's "superficial and insufficient" investigation following a woman's report in December 2013 that she'd been raped and threatened during an overnight stay at Uintah Basin Medical Center eight months earlier.

Yes, Shumway was working at the hospital on the night of the alleged attack, the judge said. Yes, his name appeared once on the woman's medical charts, hospital records showed. But the woman was never asked to identify her attacker until she was actually in the courtroom with Shumway, Peterson wrote.

"The in-court show up of (Shumway) to the alleged victim irreparably tainted her ability to independently identify the alleged perpetrator," Peterson wrote.

Investigative mistakes

The judge noted that the detective never sought to confirm if Shumway actually matched the woman's description of her attacker — a man with facial hair and glasses who smelled like a smoker, wore shoes that squeaked when he walked and had moles on his abdomen — and failed to include much of that detailed description in his application for an arrest warrant.

Instead, the judge wrote, the detective's arrest warrant affidavit made it seem as if the woman and hospital administrators had positively identified Shumway — who wears glasses and had a beard at the time — as the alleged attacker based on photographs and the fact that he no longer worked at the hospital.

"I think I was a target of convenience," Shumway said Monday, adding that he believes police and prosecutors thought, "'Here's a person. He's there doing his job. Why not? Instead of doing our jobs, let's just make this stick.'"

A play on faith

In his ruling, Peterson said Butcher misled the court to obtain the warrant for Shumway's arrest, used coercive interrogation tactics and failed to fully advise Shumway of his Miranda rights. Butcher also played on the Mormon faith he and Shumway share to convince Shumway he was acting on his behalf as a religious counselor, according to the judge.

Shumway said he did trust Butcher because he was a police officer and a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Despite that trust, Shumway never admitted to sexually assaulting the woman.

He did, however, surrender his nursing license to a state regulator who showed up at the jail before Shumway had met with an attorney or made his first court appearance — a decision Shumway still has difficulty explaining.

"I don't think I was in the mind frame … to make wise and intelligent decisions on a case that had ramifications for the rest of my life," he said, pointing out that he was still confused after his arrest and had been isolated in a jail cell for days with no ability to contact family or friends.

"I don't suppose most of us would have made the right decision in those circumstances," Shumway said.

No longer a nurse

During the past two years, Shumway has had to rely heavily on family and friends. He is now working for a construction company owned by a family member, and is living in a faded motor home in the parking lot of a family-owned business. He has legal bills to pay and hasn't decided yet whether he wants to try to pursue a lawsuit against police and prosecutors, or if he'll ever try to get his nursing license back.

"Do I trust going back into a field where they can make one allegation and it doesn't matter what the truth of the matter is?" Shumway said. "I think all nurses everywhere should be afraid of this, especially male nurses, because it doesn't matter if there's any traction to the claims. It just matters what the police do."

As for his thoughts about the patient who reported that she'd been raped?

"I can't imagine the suffering she's gone through," Shumway said, "and I can't imagine the suffering she'll continue to go through, knowing that this investigation was not handled in the appropriate manner."

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