In This Police Youth Program [Police Explorers] a Trail of Sexual Abuse Across the U.S.

Explorer posts, overseen by the Boy Scouts, are supposed to foster an interest in policing. They have faced nearly 200 allegations of misconduct.​

The last known person to see Sandra Birchmore alive was a police officer.

He stopped by her apartment days before the elementary school teacher’s aide, 23 years old and newly pregnant, was found dead in February 2021. The medical examiner later ruled her death a suicide.

The officer worked for the Stoughton Police Department, near Boston, where he first met Birchmore about a decade earlier through the agency’s Explorer post — part of a youth mentorship program run by local departments across the country.

He acknowledged having sex with her when she was 15, according to a court ruling citing the officer’s text messages. That document indicates that his twin brother — also an officer and Explorer mentor — and a third Stoughton officer, a veteran who ran the program, eventually had sex with her, too.

Birchmore’s case is among at least 194 allegations that law enforcement personnel, mostly policemen, have groomed, sexually abused or engaged in inappropriate behavior with Explorers since 1974, an ongoing investigation by The Marshall Project has found. The vast majority of those affected were teenage girls — some as young as 13.