Timothy Coley

A Cody sex offender who was roughly a week late in updating his address with the Park County Sheriff’s Office has been ordered to serve two to four years in prison.

Timothy A. Coley, 55, accepted the prison time as part of a deal with prosecutors. The agreement involved him pleading guilty to a felony count of failing to report a new address to the sheriff’s office for a subsequent time.

Court records show it was the third time in five years that Coley had failed to comply with Wyoming’s rules governing sex offenders.

Coley is required to register as a sex offender because of a 2013 misdemeanor conviction for second-degree sexual abuse in Alabama — a crime that, according to state records, involved Coley having sexual contact with a minor who was between 13 and 16 years old.

He later moved to Park County and ran into registration trouble in 2015. That year, he began living within 1,000 feet of Powell Middle School in violation of state law and set up a Facebook account under his birth name without notifying authorities of the alias, according to a Park County Sheriff’s Office investigation at the time. Coley reportedly said he hadn’t realized his Powell residence was too close to the school and that he just hadn’t thought about the longtime social media account.

Coley wound up serving 40 days in jail for the undisclosed Facebook alias and, in lieu of three to five years of prison, was placed on three years of supervised probation.

However, in June 2017, he was charged with battering his wife, which prompted the Park County Attorney’s Office to seek to revoke his probation. Then in May 2018, the Park County Sheriff’s Office learned from Coley’s probation agent that he had moved about two weeks earlier, without notifying the office. That led to another felony offense and an 18- to 24-month prison term.

Coley finished his prison and probationary sentences by October 2019, but he ran afoul of the sex offender registration rules again last spring.

Coley had told the sheriff’s office he was living at a residence on Cody’s 21st Street. However, Cody police learned that he had moved out on April 5, charging documents indicate.

Coley notified the sheriff’s office on April 16 that he no longer had a home, which “was nine business days after leaving the address on 21st Street in Cody,” Park County Sheriff’s Deputy Phil Johnson wrote in an affidavit; state law requires offenders to update their addresses within three business days.

The Park County Attorney’s office filed the felony charge in July and Coley has remained in jail since then. His guilty plea and sentencing followed on Dec. 1 in Park County District Court.

Judge Bill Simpson finalized the two to four years of prison time in a Dec. 15 order, giving Coley credit for the roughly five months he’d already served in jail. He’s currently awaiting transport to a Wyoming Department of Corrections facility.