Improper conduct with girl alleged

STAFF REPORT

CANFIELD — A Youngstown resident will appear in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court to face a charge of gross sexual imposition.

Canfield Detective Andy Bodzak said Eric Fairchild, 32, of Pasadena Avenue, Youngstown, was arrested Wednesday by the U.S. Marshals Task Force and taken to the Mahoning County jail. He was released Friday after posting $25,000 bond.

He will be arraigned in front of Judge John Durkin at 9 a.m. today.

Canfield police began investigating Fairchild in early May, after a female seventh-grader at Canfield Middle School told guidance counselors that she’d “made out” with a much older adult male. The guidance counselors contacted the police department.

The girl told police she was friends with Fairchild’s daughter and had stayed overnight at her friend’s home about 30 times over the course of the friendship.

She said in November she was with Fairchild’s daughter at his previous residence on Woodland Run in Canfield. She said he was asleep on the couch where she was sitting. She said she lay down on the couch and fell asleep next to him, and when she woke, his hand was in her pants.

The girl said Fairchild woke up shortly after, and she told him what had happened.

During questioning, Fairchild told police when he went to sleep that night, the girl wasn’t next to him on the couch, and he had no recollection of putting his hand in her pants.

He said he offered his cell phone to the girl so that she could call her parents to pick her up, but she refused.

The second incident is alleged to have occurred in April at another previous residence on Carriage Lane in Canfield. The girl told police she was sleeping on the floor next to Fairchild, facing away from him, when he began touching her over her clothes. She said she turned over, and they began kissing.

The girl told police Fairchild never asked her to touch him in any way, and he asked her if everything was OK, to which she responded, “sure.”

She said the contact lasted only a few minutes and stopped when his wife returned home around 3 a.m.

Fairchild told police he never had any sexual contact with the girl, and when he fell asleep on the floor that evening, the girl was asleep on the couch.

Both Fairchild and the girl told police text messages were exchanged, though none of them were sexual in nature. Police searched the phone records of Fairchild and the girl from November 2008 to May 2009 but found no contact between the two.

Fairchild was indicted by a Mahoning County grand jury July 6.