Dixie police arrest man in rape of 10-year-old

ST. GEORGE — Police arrested a man accused of raping a 10-year-old girl who befriended his daughter.

Officers became aware of the case just before midnight on Saturday, when the girl's mother called to report her daughter missing. The girl was staying with her father at a local motel.

"She had made friends with another girl who lived in the same motel," said St. George Police Sgt. James Van Fleet.

Police said Jeremy James Irwin, 33, invited the girl to go with his 10-year-old daughter to get something to eat Saturday night. They wound up at a home near Middleton Drive, Van Fleet said.

Police said while there, the girl was taken into a back room and raped.

The girl was able to call her mother, who came and picked her up, police said. The girl told her mother she had been sexually assaulted, Van Fleet said.

Irwin was booked into the Purgatory Jail and charged with child rape, sodomy on a child, and kidnapping, all first-degree felonies; and child sex abuse, a second-degree felony. He remains in jail at $500,000 bail.