School sex abuse suspect is lured into a trap by alleged victim * WorldNetDaily * by James Varney. Real Clear Wire

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Sad Lesson of School Sexual Abuse 101: Pass the Trash

Brent and Donna McGee were the “First Couple” of Wetumka, Oklahoma. He was the athletic director and football coach at the high school who had once been mayor; she was the superintendent of the school system.

And as if all that local power wasn’t enough, they also owned the Dairy Queen, the main gathering place in this small country town and a major source of jobs for high school students.

That all came crashing down on Aug. 21, when Brent McGee was arrested for sexually abusing minors over the course of decades. The former coach’s arrest may have come as a shock to many in the town of about 1,500, but it came as no surprise to Casey Yochum, who was one of McGee’s star athletes when he played football and soccer at various times in the early ’90s at nearby Noble High School.

“He was always ‘the cool coach,'” Yochum told RealClearInvestigations. “He’d buy you booze, you could go to his house and drink, talk about girls — maybe pay your dental bill or your hair. Then he said, ‘What if I buy you a car?’ What kid doesn’t want a car to play college football?”

But McGee wanted something in return, Yochum said. First, he watched porn in his apartment, and gradually Yochum began masturbating to McGee. The coach used a code word that only the two knew — “a Pablo,” which Yochum said his teammates wouldn’t notice if the coach used it in front of them, because he often used Spanish words with the soccer team.

McGee was arrested three weeks after two other Wetumka High School alumni, Donna McGee and the Independent School District, filed a federal lawsuit against him on August 2. In addition to the seven counts of child sexual abuse, McGee was also charged with participating in a series of criminal offenses.

William Lunn, a Tulsa attorney who has spoken to McGee about his representation, said McGee is contesting all charges against him and expects him to appear in court.

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McGee’s arrest is an outlier in the murky realm of sexual abuse by school employees. Research estimates that only 5% of K-12 sexual misconduct cases are reported to law enforcement, and only a fraction of those result in prosecution. More telling is the many years he may have gotten away with his alleged crimes.

Experts point to the high-profile cases of child sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts and say alleged predators often exploit the apparent power imbalance between themselves and their victims. This dynamic is driving the widespread but largely ignored epidemic of sexual abuse in the nation’s high schools.

In addition to their ability to manipulate inexperienced children, many educational predators thrive by gaining positions of trust and prestige within a school, a reputation that often protects them from accusations of questionable behavior. Advocates and experts who have studied the problem also say the predators are often protected by labor agreements, union membership or bureaucratic inertia and failures that allow them to move from one school to another, picking up more victims along the way. The phenomenon is so widespread that it has a name: “passing the trash.”

Since 2010, there have been at least 149 such workers in Oklahoma, according to state Rep. Sherrie Conley. Conley, a leading sponsor of a new law to prevent sexual abuse in schools, said she was shocked by what she learned.

“Here in Oklahoma, all the players — whether they’re directly involved or just enabling it — cover for each other,” Conley said. “Usually, it turns out that people who knew didn’t want to tarnish the reputation of a school or didn’t investigate the allegations thoroughly because they just didn’t want to mess with anything.”

The relatively few cases that make headlines and result in arrests are often not the result of the persistence of school systems and law enforcement, but of the willingness of victims to come forward with their alleged abusers, often at great personal cost.

McGee likely would never have been arrested if it hadn’t been for Yochum’s work to bring him to justice—after decades of suppressing memories of his abuse. For years, Yochum, who grew up in a single-parent household and saw McGee as a father figure, couldn’t understand why he was in so much trouble. He drank heavily and had run-ins with the law. He eventually sobered up, joined the Army, and served a tour in Afghanistan.

According to Glenn Lipson, a clinical psychologist who has worked with the FBI and SESAME (Stop Educator Sexual Abuse Misconduct & Exploitation), such a delay is not uncommon among sexual abuse victims who have been targeted by predators who convince them the relationship is something special.

“A lot of people see something in the media, or finally get a special connection with someone, and realize that they’ve been fooled, that what happened to them is not unique,” ​​Lipson said.

Earlier in this series:
Part 1: Forbidden Fruit in the Classroom
Part 2: You, the Taxpayer, Are Responsible

In August 2019, Yochum, as one of McGee’s former stars, was asked to speak at a ceremony at Noble High School honoring the former coach. He did so, feeling “sick to my soul” afterward.

But Yochum only made the connection between the alleged abuse and his mental storms afterward, when a blind date asked him to tell her something about him that no one else knew.

“I just said, ‘I was abused by my high school football coach,'” Yochum recalled. “It hit me like a baseball bat. It flew out of my mouth and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.”

With his eyes wide open, Yochum sought out McGee again. He contacted his former coach and on November 28, 2020, a date Yochum remembers as his birthday, he drove to Wetumka and picked up McGee to talk things out.

It was just the two men in Yochum’s pickup truck, along with a recording device Yochum had hidden. On the tape, part of which was made public by an Oklahoma Substack site, V1SUT, the two discussed what had happened between them at Noble. Yochum took his tape to the FBI.

“I tried to come up with a case to catch him because I knew I wasn’t the only one,” Yochum said.

The federal government told him the statute of limitations on his case had expired, but Yochum pursued it anyway. At some point in the two years since, he said, law enforcement agencies from the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigations and the Hughes County Sheriff’s Office have looked into it. None responded to RealClearInvestigations’ inquiries and phone calls.

Then, in 2022, the FBI asked Yochum if he could record McGee again, this time using the bureau’s equipment. They hooked him up in the parking lot of a nearby Dollar General, and Yochum said he repeated the process he had performed two years earlier. The FBI said it had turned the case over to state authorities and declined to comment further.

In September 2022, FBI agents came to Wetumka High School and said McGee was not allowed to be around children. At the end of that school year in 2023, Donna McGee retired and the state Department of Education ordered Brent McGee to surrender his teaching license, a process he refused to appeal.

Still, nothing happened. When RCI first spoke to Yochum, days before the arrest, he was furious about what he saw as unnecessary delays by law enforcement, which he believes put other young men in danger.

“I’m 100 percent not okay with it,” he said.

Four days before his arrest, District Attorney Erik Johnson denied neglecting the case, which had been assigned to him in January.

“My lead investigators are focused on this case, but I will not be influenced or pressured into taking action until I am confident,” Johnson said.

It wasn’t as if there weren’t more flags raised over McGee. Last November, Zachary Williams, a star player on the Wetumka High football team, was pulled from a rival game. He was irate on the sidelines, and according to witnesses, Donna McGee came out of the stands to console Williams.

“Your husband raped me!” Williams began screaming, according to multiple accounts of the alleged incident, three decades after McGee’s alleged encounters with Yochum.

Williams and Brandon Rhinehart, another football player and DQ employee, are plaintiffs in the federal lawsuit. Although they did not respond to a request for comment, their attorney, Laurie Koller, said Yochum has been there for the young men. “Casey has really helped them process what happened to them,” she said.

On August 22, McGee posted a $250,000 bond and left in the care of his wife. The couple has not yet commented publicly.

Yochum said he was exhausted and elated and said he expects the case against McGee to grow.

“I’ve had other people reach out to me on Facebook claiming to be victims but wondering if they could remain anonymous,” he said. “All of that, and I can tell you Brent has shown zero remorse.”

This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.

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