David Lon Humphrey, a former Lincoln City City Council member and longtime Lincoln County School District teacher, died on Thanksgiving Day at the Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution in Pendleton. He was 66.
According to court records, Humphrey was sentenced to 84 months in prison following his March 17, 2014, conviction for encouraging child sex abuse.
He was just two weeks away from his earliest release date of Dec. 9, but passed away while in the institution’s end-of-life care program, an Oregon Department of Corrections news release said.
The Oregon State Police have been notified and the medical examiner will determine cause of death.
Mr. Humphrey was a dear friend of me and my family. While we do not condone what he did, we (and many others) continued to love him through his incarceration.
To be abundantly clear to anyone reading, Mr. Humphrey was NEVER accused of abusing any child by any party. The term “sex offender” in the headline, while technically accurate, is very misleading. It implies a degree of abuse and infliction of horror that was never even alleged to be the case here. Instead, Mr. Humphrey’s fate is a cautionary tale about what happens when good people get too curious online and look at things that they should not look at.
While what he did was bad, it is necessary to put his actions into their proper context. He was not a monster, he was a decent man who made a horrible mistake and accepted the punishment society gave him as right and just. That it turned out to a life sentence is heartbreaking to the many people who looked forward to helping him rebuild his life when he was scheduled for release late next year.
Out of respect for Mr. Humphrey, his family and other loved ones, I ask that people in the community keep these things in mind before responding with vitriol or blanket condemnation. There are real human costs to satisfying our needs for righteous indignation, and just because you don’t have to pay those costs doesn’t mean they aren’t there.
The truth resists simplicity and the world is more complicated than you think it is.
He had child porn. That means he watched, and by extention, condoned and encouraged children being RAPED and ABUSED. That makes him a monster. Defending him because he didn’t do it himself makes you almost as bad.
I have cut ties with family for doing what you are doing now. You are defending someone that let children be raped for his own pleasure.
I’ve cut ties with friends and family for what you’re doing. Not allowing this person close to the accused to have their own opinion which is not invalid, it’s their own.
For someone to know somebody and have to have that internal struggle of knowing the person did something awful, but you saw so many more great things out of them. You can’t take that away, and your hateful control speech isn’t a hinderance, moreso an annoyance.
There is no excuse but he was mentally ill, and many people that you know and love, most likely your family include are mentally ill and don’t know it, or don’t do anything about it.
David Humphrey was a great teacher to many of us, and I’ll say that though my view is tainted of him greatly, I know he did many great things for kids in our area that a lot of the faculty didn’t. He cared about providing the kids an education and making them all feel equal, unfortunately he didn’t see the broken boundaries watching others do harm to children…
Exactly!