A former state Division of Criminal Investigation agent pleaded guilty Wednesday to a felony child enticement charge and faces sentencing next week by a Dane County judge.
Two other charges against Lamont L. Crockett, 35, of Shorewood, were dismissed as part of a plea agreement in which prosecutors and Crockett and his attorney will ask Circuit Judge David Conway to place Crockett on five years of probation, with nine months in jail as a condition of his probation.
A sentence of four years in prison and four years of extended supervision would be suspended under the recommendation, according to the agreement.
The investigation began with investigators looking into incidents that occurred while Crockett was a Sun Prairie police officer and a school resource officer. He was an officer in Sun Prairie from 2015 to 2020 and then was hired by the state Department of Justice, first in DOJ’s Division of Legal Services and then in the Division of Criminal Investigation, as a Medicaid fraud investigator, starting in February 2023.
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Crockett was placed on administrative leave after his arrest in August 2023. DOJ spokesperson Gillian Drummond said he was fired the next month.
The child enticement charge is the most serious of three charges Crockett faced and carries a sentence of up to 25 years of combined prison and extended supervision. Conway can consider Crockett’s conduct involving the two dismissed charges — sexual assault of a child by a person who works with children and exposing a child to harmful material — when he sentences Crockett on the enticement conviction.
The assault charge carried a six-year maximum sentence, and the harmful material charge carried up to 3½ years.
Originally, both sides had asked Conway to order a presentence investigation by the state Department of Corrections before sentencing, but Conway decided to forgo that report, citing the 60 days it would take before Crockett could be sentenced. Instead, Conway set sentencing for Sept. 26.
Conway briefly considered revoking Crockett’s bail and ordering him taken into custody to await sentencing but instead ordered him to report to Dane County Pretrial Services to be fitted with a GPS monitor. Conway said he wants to ensure that Crockett will come to court next week for sentencing.
According to a criminal complaint, Crockett was being investigated for the alleged sexual assault of a Sun Prairie Phoenix Academy student when another incident, this one involving another teenage boy, came to light. The boy’s mother told police she was searching the Dane County Jail roster in August 2023, after Crockett’s arrest on a tentative sexual assault charge, and recognized Crockett as someone who had been her son’s mentor.
That month, the complaint states, the boy told police and an interviewer at Safe Harbor, which specializes in forensic interviews of child sexual assault victims, that Crockett had made sexual jokes and talked about male genitals, tried to expose himself to the boy in the restroom of a Walmart, and did so again in the restroom of a movie theater on another occasion.
There were similar incidents in a vehicle and the boy told police Crockett had shown the boy a video of himself having sex with a woman, the complaint states.
The boy said that at one point Crockett told him that if he told anyone, “Nobody would believe you,” and that he would be a “snitch,” and that made the boy feel unsafe, according to the complaint.