Hung: Jury can’t decide on guilt of former youth minister charged with online solicitation of minor.
They gave it the ol’ college try, but jurors in the Ryan Ivy case couldn’t come to a unanimous decision about his guilt on Wednesday.
Ivy, a former Bluff Dale youth minister, was charged with online solicitation of a minor stemming from a string of sexually charged messages he exchanged with a 13-year-old Bluff Dale middle school student in July 2020.
At 7:30 p.m. – more than five hours after deliberations began - the jury sent a note to Judge Jason Cashon stating that they had reached an impasse.
Cashon called jurors back into the courtroom and encouraged them to resume deliberations in an attempt to reach a unanimous verdict, but it was to no avail.
A mistrial was declared and Cashon said the case will likely be retried in the future.
DAY 2 TESTIMONY
Wednesday’s testimony began with the now 16-year-old victim answering questions from Erath County Assistant District Attorney Jett Smith about her communication with Ivy back in 2020 when she was a 13-year-old middle school student in Bluff Dale.
Ivy, who also worked at Bluff Dale ISD as an aide at the time, was acquainted with the victim through school and church.
The victim testified that as her communication with Ivy turned sexual in nature, she confided what was happening to a friend, a 15-year-old boy she attended school with.
The boy began posing as the victim as part of a plan to get Ivy to ramp up talk about sex.
“We did plan to turn him in, but we just needed more proof,” she said.
Ivy’s defense attorney Rob Christian suggested that the entire thing was a setup.
“Did at any point you think this was funny to string Mr. Ivy along?” Christian asked, to which the victim answered, “no.”
On Tuesday, jurors were shown a string of messages between Ivy and the child that included talk of three-way and oral sex.
After Ivy's arrest, Beneath the Surface News interviewed the victim's mother; click here to read the full story.
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