Photo: WOWT 6 News / U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Iowa
(Undated) -- An Iowa man is sentenced to over 30 years in prison for sexually assaulting two teens he kidnapped in Omaha in 2003.
On Wednesday, 43 year old Myron Lee Brandon, of Pacific Junction, was sentenced to 405 months, or 33 years and nine months, in federal prison for two counts of kidnapping and two counts of transportation of a minor. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Iowa says his sentence will be followed by 10 years of supervised release.
Court documents show that on June 21, 2003, Brandon offered to give the 14 and 15-year-old girls a ride from 24th and Leavenworth streets to another location in Omaha, but he instead took them to rural Iowa. Federal prosecutors say he drove them to a remote location near Pacific Junction, threatened them with a knife and tied them up before sexually assaulting them. Prosecutors say Brandon also burned the victims on their breasts with a cigarette.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office says while he was throwing gasoline on them from a canister in the bed of his truck, the girls ran to Interstate 29 and were picked up by two people who helped them. The initial police investigation began the next day, but didn't lead to a suspect. The victims’ sexual assault kits were stored into evidence, and were kept on file until Brandon was arrested in February 2020.
A release from the The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Iowa states that, “In 2015, the Iowa Attorney General’s Office implemented the Sexual Assault Initiative, a program that submitted unsolved sexual assault kits to a laboratory to identify any DNA evidence.” DNA was then traced to Brandon, who was registered with the Iowa Sex Offender Registry.
A jury found Brandon guilty of all charges in October of 2021.
The case was investigated by the Pottawattamie County Sheriff’s Office, Council Bluffs Police Department, and Omaha Police Department, with assistance from the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation, FBI, and the Iowa and Nebraska Attorneys General’s Offices.