Lawrence teen arrested in armed robbery after prior juvenile acquittal

A Lawrence teenager who walked out of a rare juvenile jury trial without convictions in December was back in custody Friday, this time on suspicion of armed robbery after police say a gun dispute at the Eighth Street boat ramp escalated into warning shots and a stolen firearm.

Jayse Michael Sloop, 18, was arrested around midnight May 1 and booked into the Douglas County Jail. The jail log initially placed the arrest at 102 N. Eighth St., the boat ramp, but Lawrence police spokeswoman Laura McCabe said the arrest actually happened at the Kwik Shop on Massachusetts Street. Police said the discrepancy was in the booking record, not the arrest itself.

McCabe said the people involved knew each other and had arranged to meet at the boat ramp on April 27. According to police, one person arrived with a third person, and investigators believe the two men who arrived together stole the first man’s firearm. Police said warning shots were then fired from two different weapons to force that man to leave. No one was physically injured, but officers found shell casings at the scene. A second suspect had not been arrested by Friday morning.

The new arrest lands just four months after Sloop was acquitted on Dec. 17, 2025, in a juvenile trial that Douglas County lawyers described as unusual. Jurors in Douglas County District Court, with Judge Sally Pokorny presiding, found him not guilty of two counts of aggravated assault. Assistant Douglas County District Attorney Devin Canfield represented the state, and defense attorney Mark Hartman represented Sloop.

Those aggravated-assault allegations were said to have occurred in October 2024 and reportedly involved a gun. Because the case was handled as a juvenile proceeding, much of Sloop’s earlier court history remains sealed, limiting public visibility into how the case moved through the system before the acquittal.

The new arrest adds another high-profile gun case to Lawrence’s recent youth-crime docket and raises the same question now facing police, prosecutors and defense attorneys: what changes, if anything, once a teen leaves juvenile court and reappears in an adult case with a new allegation attached. Hartman also represented Derrick Del Reed, who was acquitted in 2024 of first-degree murder in the shooting death of 14-year-old Kamarjay Shaw, underscoring how often the same defense names return in the city’s most serious youth cases.