Dustin Ayres Is a Level 3 Predatory Offender. He's Moved Twice Inside Cass County in Under a Year.

The Cass County Sheriff's Office issued a Level 3 community notification on June 8, 2026, for a registered predatory offender who had moved into the area. The fact sheet and the court history behind it — four criminal cases in four counties over almost twenty years — lay out the following.

Who he is and what happened

Dustin Gene Ayres, born May 3, 1982, changed his registered address to Northwest Sylvan Township, in the rural Pillager area of Cass County, effective June 4, 2026. The Sheriff's Office issued its fact sheet four days later. He is classified Risk Level 3 — the highest tier under Minnesota's community-notification law — which is why the notification was public rather than limited to law enforcement.

This is not a fresh release. Ayres has been out of custody since May 5, 2025, more than a year before this notification, and it is not his first move since then: he had already relocated once, to the rural Pine River area, in August 2025, a few months after release. This is his second registered address within Cass County in under a year. Nothing in the public record explains the second move. That is a question for the Sheriff's Office.

What he was released from in 2025

The May 2025 release was not the end of a sentence for either original sex-offense case; those were served out years earlier. It was the end of a 20-month sentence out of Cass County — the same county he is registered in now — for a 2024 felony conviction for attempting to violate his predatory-offender registration requirement. That was his second felony conviction of that kind. The first was in Morrison County in 2007-2008. The record shows two separate felony registration-violation convictions, sixteen years apart.

The signed sentencing order for the 2024 Cass County case, not just the online summary, was signed by Judge Jana M. Austad on April 22, 2024. The charge, originally a completed registration violation, was amended by plea agreement to an attempted violation, a felony. The 20-month term followed the standard structure — roughly 13 months in prison and up to about 7 months of supervised release — which lines up with a May 2025 release. The $135 in fines and fees was waived.

The two original cases — and why they differ

The county notification says Ayres engaged in sexual contact against a known female child and a known female teen in separate incidents years ago. That is the agency's characterization. The court record distinguishes "charged with" from "convicted of," and in one of these two cases the distinction matters.

The child-victim case is Isanti County 30-CR-05-851, filed November 2005. Ayres was charged with and pleaded guilty to second-degree criminal sexual conduct — the victim was under 13, with offense dates running through October 2005. In December 2006, Judge Kenneth J. Maas Jr. imposed a stayed 39-month prison term in favor of probation: 220 days of local confinement (largely covered by jail credit) and a 25-year probation term through 2031, with sex-offender treatment, no contact with the victim or her family, no unsupervised contact with minors, no unsupervised internet access, and periodic polygraph testing. He did not complete probation cleanly. Violation warrants issued in late 2007; at a July 2008 hearing the violation was found and admitted, the court executed the stayed sentence, and Ayres went to prison for the full 39 months.

The teen-victim case requires more care. It is Benton County 05-CR-06-3424, filed December 2006, offense date December 8, 2006. Ayres was originally charged with three counts: first-degree burglary; fourth-degree criminal sexual conduct (609.345.1(d), covering a victim who is mentally impaired or otherwise helpless); and trespass. The criminal-sexual-conduct count was later amended to a lesser fifth-degree charge, and at sentencing in May 2008 both that count and the trespass count were dismissed under a plea agreement. Ayres pleaded guilty to, and was convicted of, first-degree burglary — for entering the victim's residence without permission. Judge James W. Hoolihan imposed 39 months at MCF-St. Cloud, executed immediately, not stayed.

The notification's reference to Minn. Stat. 609.345 for this incident is technically correct — Ayres was charged under that statute — but he was never convicted of a sex offense in the Benton County case. He was convicted of burglary. The accurate description of the sexual-conduct count is "charged, later dismissed," not "convicted."

The registration statute

Minnesota's registration law, Minn. Stat. 243.166, ties this together. It requires registration for anyone charged with certain sex offenses — including 609.343 (the Isanti case) and 609.345 (the Benton case) — and then convicted either of that offense or of another offense arising out of the same set of circumstances. That second clause is why the Benton County burglary conviction counts as a registration-triggering offense even though the sex charge on the same incident was dismissed, and it is why the fact sheet lists "609.345 (charge)" for a case with no sex-offense conviction: the law tracks the original charge, not only the final conviction.

The same statute requires lifetime registration — not the standard ten years — when someone convicted of a registration-triggering offense already has a prior conviction that also triggered registration. Ayres's first qualifying conviction was Isanti County in 2006. When the Benton County case resolved in 2008 with a burglary conviction that itself qualifies, both conditions for lifetime registration were met.

On that reading of the statute, applied to the verified court records, Ayres has been a lifetime predatory-offender registrant since 2008 — not a ten-year term. This is an analysis of the public statute applied to the public case records, not a determination confirmed by the Department of Corrections, and the DOC Predatory Offender Registration Unit has not confirmed it. As a reading of the law it is well supported, and it is a more accurate answer to how long he must register than the fact sheet or the court records state directly: there may be no end date.

The rest of the record

Beyond those four cases, Ayres has an extensive, mostly unrelated criminal history going back to 2000 — repeated burglary convictions in Isanti County (2000-2001, 2004), Morrison County (2015), and Otter Tail County (2022, where a third-degree burglary conviction survived after first- and second-degree counts were dismissed), a 2024-2025 gross-misdemeanor theft conviction in Todd County, and a long list of traffic convictions. None of that is part of his registration history, but it is part of the full picture of a man who has been in and out of Minnesota's courts for a quarter century.

How this was handled publicly

Because Ayres is Level 3, the notification could legally reach a wider audience than for a lower-risk registrant. A few local outlets picked up the relocation notice — the Pine and Lakes Echo Journal, the Brainerd Dispatch, and Lakeland PBS ran short items restating the fact sheet. No metro or statewide outlet covered it. There is no evidence Cass County held or scheduled an in-person community meeting about the relocation; the notification was limited to posting the fact sheet on the county website and Facebook page.

The Sheriff's Office states in its own fact sheet that Ayres has served the sentences imposed on him and is not currently wanted. Law enforcement has no authority to dictate where a registrant lives, works, or attends school. The notification is the mechanism the law provides for public awareness, not a tool for exclusion, and should not be read as one.