'You ruined my life:' testimony and FB messages convict molester here

ALLEN COUNTY, Ind. ---It was a random post on Facebook that brought back memories of the time when the middle schooler lost her virginity to a man named Shane Frost.

The 13-year-old was spending the summer with her stepmother who worked at a funeral home in Elkhart where Frost was the manager.

Everyone was apparently unaware when the sexual relationship began, certainly the stepmother, and the victim, 13, found it enjoyable at the time. It gave her the attention she needed, according to testimony.

Shane Frost

That and she was having trouble with her father and Frost, 39, was a father figure.

She carried the secret of sex acts committed at the funeral home, in the cemetery and the final sex act at the Knights Inn (now the Kings Inn.) 

She never told anyone about the time he hightailed it down to Fort Wayne to meet up with her in September 2010, according to the probable cause affidavit submitted by Det. Sgt. Todd Battershell with the Fort Wayne Police Department’s Crimes Against Persons unit.

Frost picked her up from her mother’s home, took her to a cheap hotel on Goshen Road, and there he took her virginity, Deputy Prosecutor Tracy Noetzel said in closing arguments Thursday.

The victim remembered that it hurt and there was blood. They took a shower together and no, she didn’t notice a tattoo, the defense brought up. The prosecutors said Frost was heavier at the time and the tattoo could have been hidden by stomach flab.

Frost, now 55, was convicted on three counts of child molesting, stemming from sex acts in 2010. They are two counts of sexual misconduct with a minor, a class B felony, and child solicitation, a class D felony.

The statute of limitations for child molesting charges ends at the age of 31, prosecutors said. The victim is in her 20s.

The victim’s secret became a burden, affecting her life, and after she saw his Facebook page, she contacted him on Facebook messenger in September 2023 to confront him.

“What you did to me was considered rape,” she told him in one exchange. His reply was not a denial, but conciliatory.

“I am so very sorry for hurting you…I had no idea that I caused all this pain,” he wrote.

In closing arguments, Noetzel and deputy prosecutor Emily Snyder quoted the victim telling Frost he ruined her life. 

“I was a child,” she said.

On the stand, Frost tried to appeal to the jury telling them he was “very empathetic” and a “people pleaser,” according to Noetzel and Snyder. In the probable cause, he said he was a victim of abuse by a babysitter when he was five or six.

Frost’s attorney, Gregory Ridenour picked apart some of the stories the victim had to tell.

An incident partially witnessed by the victim’s stepmother had the 13-year-old victim in Frost’s office at the funeral home when her stepmother opened the door. 

The stepmother saw the victim with a “red face” and tousled hair which Ridenour said didn’t immediately mean the two were having sex.

Snyder made mincemeat of that saying that no one needs to undo trousers when a hand is down there. 

Noetzel described sex acts at the funeral home and in the cemetery where Frost took her as “grooming,” which paid off for the defendant after the victim had moved back to Fort Wayne and started school.

They exchanged phone calls, no longer traceable after so many years, and he showed up quickly to have sex. Just as quickly he returned to Elkhart.

The prosecutors argued that the defense would portray the victim as bitter, that she was “jealous of his life and he was successful and she wasn’t,” Noetzel said. 

“She struggled that she actually liked him and the attention,” Noetzel added.

In the 500 cases that Battershell has filed, 95% of them are delayed, a combination of “fear, shame, guilt and not aware of what’s wrong,” Noetzel said.

“She walked into the police department all by herself on Oct 6, 2023,” said Noetzel who’s handled countless cases like this. “Todd Battershell called her three days later.”

Prosecutors say Frost, due to be sentenced on March 17, faces up to 31 years in prison. Allen Superior Court Judge David Zent presided over the trial.

Frost has another case with the same victim pending in Elkhart County. Those charges date from 2009. A trial is scheduled to begin on April 6.