Published: May 12, 2008 11:29 pm            

Jones’ trial begins

Former BCHS assistant coach faces first-degree sodomy charge

CATLETTSBURG — Editor’s note: This story contains material that some readers may find offensive.



Did former Boyd County High School assistant football coach Vincent Jones force a female student at the school to perform a sexual act on him?

Or was Jones the victim of false accusations leveled against him by a pair of teenagers because they wanted him to lose his job?

It will be up to a Boyd Circuit Court jury to make that determination.

Jones’ trial on a charge of first-degree sodomy began Monday. The charge is a Class B felony, meaning Jones could be sentenced to 10 to 20 years in prison if he is convicted.

Jones, 46, was arrested in April of last year after the family of a 17-year-old student reported to the Boyd County Sheriff’s Department that Jones had forced the girl to perform oral sex on him while he was supervising an in-school suspension program at the high school known as Choosing Alternative Behaviors, or CAB. The alleged incident occurred on March 27, 2007, but wasn’t reported until the alleged victim told her father about it two days later.

Special prosecutor Gary Conn, in his opening remarks to jurors, said Jones had the alleged victim and one other girl in the CAB program on the day of the alleged incident. The girls, he said, were passing sexually explicit notes to one another, which were intercepted by Jones.

When he read what the alleged victim had written, Jones apparently took it to mean the girl wanted to have sex with him, Conn said. He had the other girl watch the door of the trailer where the CAB program was housed, and, once the other girl was out of the room, Jones “proceeded to have forcible oral sex with (the alleged victim,)” he said.

The Independent does not publish the names of alleged sex crime victims without their permission.

Conn said the other girl who was in the program with the alleged victim told authorities she had also performed oral sex on Jones on three other occasions, including earlier on the day of the incident that led to Jones being charged. No charges were brought in connection with those incidents, he said, because the girl said the sex was consensual.

In the days after the incident, Jones followed the alleged victim to her school bus and “whispered things to her about not telling anyone, or he’d get in trouble,” Conn said. Jones also allegedly showed up at the fast-food restaurant where the girl worked part time, he said.

In his opening statement, Jones’ attorney, Michael Curtis, told jurors the commonwealth’s case against his client had “more holes in it than Swiss cheese.”

For one, he said, there was never DNA evidence found to link Jones to any sex crime, even though investigators searched for it on the clothing of the alleged victim and on the carpet in the CAB trailer, where the act allegedly took place.

Also, Curtis said he intended to call witnesses who would testify the alleged victim and the other girl, who was in CAB with her, told them they made up the allegations against Jones because they didn’t like the way he ran the program and wanted him to get fired.

Unlike the previous CAB supervisor, Jones ran a strict program because he had been instructed to do so by Boyd County school officials, Curtis said. The girls, he said, resented him because he wouldn’t allow them to talk and would make them write sentences.

The mother of the alleged victim testified Monday her daughter had been sent to the CAB program for sneaking into the teacher’s lounge to get a soda. She also had done previous stints there for smoking on school grounds, she said.

A 16-year-friend of the alleged victim’s testified she had seen the girl in a restroom following the incident at the school and the teen was “spitting up stuff on the floor and had a really scared look on her face.”

“She was really nervous and shaking. I knew something was wrong,” she said.

The alleged victim then proceeded to tell her about the encounter with Jones, she said.

Jones was suspended without pay by the school district following his arrest.

Testimony in the case was scheduled to resume at 8:30 a.m. today. Judge Marc I. Rosen is presiding.

KENNETH HART can be reached at khart@dailyindependent.com or (606) 326-2654.

        

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