How a sex offender on parole allegedly broke all the rules

As a parolee recently released from prison after being convicted of sexually assaulting a 22-year-old woman, Corbin Breitenbach had to follow rules set by the Kansas Department of Corrections.

No drinking. No contact with minors without permission. No staying the night at a place other than his approved address – his mom’s house – listed on the sex-offender registry. Those were just a few of the requirements for the 23-year-old Sedgwick County man to meet if he was to stay out of trouble – and not hurt anyone else.

But according to his girlfriend or authorities, Breitenbach broke all three rules – and the laws against sodomizing children and attempted murder – on the early morning of June 11.

He won’t be free any time soon. He remains in jail on a $1 million bond after being charged this past week with attempted capital murder, aggravated criminal sodomy and aggravated burglary for the attack in which he is accused of going into a west Wichita apartment at 2:40 a.m. June 11. The charges accuse him of taking a 7-year-old girl out of a bedroom, choking her into unconsciousness and sexually assaulting her on an outdoor balcony.

The crimes occurred just across from his girlfriend’s apartment – where he wasn’t supposed to be spending the night.

His approved address, according to the agency supervising his parole, was 21 miles away from the condo complex where the girl was attacked. His approved address was down gravel roads and past horse farms between Derby and Rose Hill.

Breitenbach – sentenced to 68 months in the 2012 attack on the 22-year-old woman, who was also strangled as part of the attack – had been released from prison on April 28. That was six weeks before the attack on the 7-year-old girl. The Department of Corrections was supervising him while he was out of prison.

The department says it took steps to help Breitenbach not commit any new crimes.

The attack on the girl “is the first violation of his supervision,” the state said.

“In addition to our supervision, we thoroughly ensured Mr. Breitenbach had supports in the community to help him stay on track,” the state said in an email Thursday in response to questions posed by The Eagle about Breitenbach’s supervision.

“He had family support and the support of his girlfriend,” the Department of Corrections said.

The girlfriend

The girlfriend who was part of his support network is the one who lives at the small complex where the girl was attacked, KDOC spokesman Todd Fertig confirmed in an email Friday.

According to KDOC, “Mr. Breitenbach’s approved residence was with his family at the previously reported address. He was not approved to stay overnight at any other location. His girlfriend was involved in his supervision and was informed of the expectations and rules of supervision.”

Yet, he was spending the night with his girlfriend at the complex where the girl was attacked, his girlfriend has said.

In a phone interview the day after Breitenbach’s arrest, the girlfriend told The Eagle that she was in bed with him shortly before the time that police say the attack happened: 2:40 a.m. Breitenbach had been with her in the hours and minutes before the attack, the girlfriend said. “We were in bed asleep. We were in the house by 2:30 a.m. … give or take a few minutes.” She asked not to be identified.

She said Breitenbach had visited her three times. “He was my boyfriend,” but they had not been dating long, she said.

He had been at a birthday party, she said, adding: “I brought him home. He’d had a little bit to drink.”

If he was drinking that night and early morning of the attack, he was violating another KDOC rule.

Also, one of the “special conditions” of his supervision was that he have no contact with minor children without permission in advance from his parole officer. His victim that night, police say, was 7. According to emergency radio traffic the morning of the attack, the 7-year-old was staying with another girl at the apartment. The second-floor unit where the victim was spending the night is 30 to 40 feet from his girlfriend’s second-floor apartment, across a small courtyard.

Residents of the complex, in the 1400 block of North Smith Court, a residential area near 13th and Zoo, have said they recognized Breitenbach as the man they saw at different times in the complex parking lot or walking with a woman on Smith Court.

His KDOC supervision

KDOC says that although Breitenbach is listed on its offender website as being under “low person” supervision and that its risk assessment found he was “low risk,” “he nonetheless was supervised at a higher level than that assessment requires.”

Breitenbach had more frequent contacts with parole officers because it was his first release under supervision and because he is a registered sex offender, KDOC said.

As a part of his supervision, the agency saw Breitenbach the day of his release and three other times, “in person, during the 43 days he was on community supervision,” the agency said. KDOC had other contacts with him that were not in person, and his next scheduled appointment with a parole supervisor was to have been this past Monday.

“All of these interactions amount to much more diligent supervision than is strictly required under a ‘low person’ risk designation,” KDOC said.

Once Breitenbach got a job, the employer was notified of his supervision status and criminal convictions, KDOC said.

The idea is that if a parolee can stay employed, he’s less apt to commit crimes.

Breitenbach wrote in a court affidavit after his arrest that he worked for Joe’s Car Wash. “To our knowledge, he was showing up for work and performing acceptably,” KDOC said.

The car wash owner, Duane Steven, said Friday that he didn’t know until two or three weeks after Breitenbach was hired that he was a sex offender. “I wish the state would let us know sooner,” Steven said. “I wish there was a better system where we would know immediately.” Steven said he couldn’t comment further.

Fertig, the KDOC spokesman, said in an email Friday that Breitenbach was required as part of his parole supervision to inform potential employers of any convictions “and his status as an offender.”

But Breitenbach did not tell his employer, said Steven, the car wash owner.

Fertig said: “Our supervising officer was first informed of Mr. Breitenbach’s employment at Joe’s Car Wash on June 8, and per our policy, a letter informing the employer of the offender’s status was generated and mailed that same day.”

By June 8 – three days before the attack on the girl – Breitenbach had been working at the car wash about three weeks, Steven said.

The Joe’s Car Wash at Second and Seneca, which is where police said they arrested Breitenbach, is 17 miles from his approved home address and a little less than 4 miles from the apartments where the girl was attacked.

Neighbors at the apartments have said they have seen different people wearing Joe’s Car Wash shirts going to the apartment where the girlfriend lives.

On his most recent picture posted on the Kansas Bureau of Investigation registered offender website, a smiling Breitenbach is wearing a blue T-shirt with a Joe’s logo. The photo was taken June 15, four days after the girl was attacked.

Neighbors in the Delano neighborhood surrounding the car wash “were just very concerned when they found out he was arrested” at Second and Seneca, said Vincent Hancock, president of the Delano Neighborhood Association. “They said, ‘That is not very far from my house.’ ”

The state offender registry doesn’t list an offender’s job information but says it “is publicly available and may be obtained by contacting the appropriate registering law enforcement agency or signing up for community notification through the official website” of the KBI.

Separate monitoring

Separate from his KDOC supervision, Breitenbach had to comply with other requirements because of his status as a sex offender. The idea is to allow the public to see whether convicts with serious crimes are living nearby.

The Sedgwick County Sheriff’s Office is responsible for checking on whether registered offenders are living at the address shown on the registry seen by the public. Breitenbach registered with the sheriff’s offender registration unit on May 4, six days after his release from prison. He then came in for his June 14 quarterly registration – three days after the attack – and was compliant on his home address, sheriff’s Capt. David Mattingly said.

Although KDOC says that under its rules Breitenbach wasn’t supposed to stay at the girlfriend’s address, the Sheriff’s Office has a different set of state rules.

“Registered offenders do not have to stay at the address they report every night,” Mattingly said in an email. “They do have to report alternate locations if they stay there 3 consecutive nights or 10 nights in a month.” According to what the girlfriend told The Eagle, it wasn’t clear whether Breitenbach’s visits to her apartment met those criteria. She hasn’t responded to follow-up calls.

Although the Sheriff’s Office checks to see whether offenders are living at their listed address, Mattingly said officers had not been to Breitenbach’s home because he had been on the registry for a relatively short period.

The sheriff’s offender registration unit has a staff of seven and recently had 2,835 registered offenders to help monitor. Of the total, 1,481 are sex offenders, 745 are violent offenders and 609 are drug offenders.

Timing of his release

Breitenbach’s sentence for the 2012 sex crimes was 68 months. He spent 45 of those months at Lansing Correctional Facility, KDOC records show.

He received credit for time spent in jail before he went to prison. He also received credit for programs in prison to help him be productive in the community.

Those credits helped move up his release from prison, but the timing was automatic under sentencing laws, KDOC said.

If Breitenbach is convicted of the new charges, he could face the rest of his life in prison.

This story was originally published June 23, 2017 at 8:29 PM with the headline "How a sex offender on parole allegedly broke all the rules."