Sammy Sussman pored over more than 10,000 police disciplinary files and reported from Penn Yan in the Finger Lakes to report this article. It is part of a series by The New York Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship .

Photographs by Lauren Petracca for The New York Times

A teenage girl came forward in May 2023 with a horrifying complaint: Her adoptive father had been raping her since 2021, she told police officers in an interview at her school. After some of the assaults, according to a police report, he would give her soda, candy or blueberry iced tea. The abuse started when she was 13.

The teen was removed from the home, and the case was assigned to Megan Morehouse, an investigator in the Yates County Sheriff’s Office who had met the girl at the school. For the department, in one

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