HE WILL BE SENTENCED IN JANUARY
A 39-year-old Dearborn man has been found guilty by a Platte County jury of two counts of felony harassment and two counts of sexual misconduct for publicly exposing himself to two female high school students in March 2019.
Gregory A. Hicks, Jr. was found guilty of all charges on Nov. 5 in a case presided over by Platte County Circuit Judge Megan Benton.
Platte County Prosecuting Attorney Eric Zahnd said, “It continues to be one of my highest priorities to aggressively prosecute crimes against children. It is incredibly important to keep our community safe from predators like this defendant. No community is truly safe unless its children are safe.”
On March 22, 2019 at 10:48 pm, Platte County Sheriff’s Deputies were dispatched to an apartment on West Third Street in Dearborn, regarding a man who had publicly exposed himself to two teenage girls while performing a sexual act on himself. Upon arrival, they interviewed three witnesses who described the man. A concerned citizen report led officers to Hicks’ location that same evening.
Deputies found Hicks at his home just blocks away from where he had exposed himself. Hicks matched the description given by the victims. Both victims also identified Hicks again that night as the man who sat just feet from their car and exposed himself to them. Both victims, young women now, testified during the trial about the lasting trauma they experienced as a result of Hicks’s actions that night.
Due to a Missouri Constitutional amendment passed in 2014 jurors also heard evidence of Hicks’s past sexual misconduct at trial. Two young female victims testified that Hicks had also exposed himself to them at a baseball field in Polo, Mo. in 2017.
Zahnd wrote the amendment allowing such evidence—called propensity evidence—and led the state campaign committee that advocated for its passage.
Zahnd said, “This constitutional amendment is a powerful tool to take repeat child sex offenders off our streets. Propensity evidence was already admissible in federal trials and the vast majority of other states. It’s good that Missouri jurors now get to hear the full truth of a child predator’s criminal past.”
“The Missouri Supreme Court had struck down two prior attempts to permit the admission of propensity evidence by statute,” Zahnd continued, “so we put it in the Constitution so they couldn’t simply ignore the law. However, some judges on the Supreme Court still appear to be hostile to propensity evidence. I call on those judges to respect the voters’ will and the Missouri Constitution—the highest law in our state.”
Hicks was arrested after the trial and is being held on a $100,000 cash-only bond. He will be sentenced on Jan. 15, 2026 and faces up to 10 years imprisonment.
Zahnd said his office would ask Judge Benton to impose the maximum sentence on the felonies.
The case was investigated by the Platte County Sheriff’s Department. It was tried by assistant prosecuting attorneys Joseph Findley and Mike Marta.
