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Former sports editor and coach admits some of his actions with female athletes were ‘inappropriate’
By Ed Runyan
JEFFERSON
In a 21/2-hour interview conducted in August 2014, Donald McCormack, former Ashtabula Star Beacon sports editor and former Jefferson High School assistant girls basketball coach, agreed with two detectives that his relationships with some of his players were “inappropriate.”
He said he was in love with one former player he’s accused of sexually assaulting in 1991, took her on a trip to Cincinnati and provided $1,800 to her family for moving expenses so she could play basketball in Jefferson.
He told a detective he probably thought his relationships with female players were OK at the time, “but looking back at it, it was inappropriate for a man to have.”
He also told the detectives that two girls who alleged he touched their buttocks one night at a party at which he and other adults were drinking alcohol are probably telling the truth, but he doesn’t know because of the amount of drinking he did.
When a detective asked McCormack whether he thought he should be charged criminally for his actions, McCormack said, “Yes,” but when asked what crimes he committed, he said only, “I need help.”
McCormack offered at one point that maybe his inappropriate actions were the result of “when you live alone, you don’t have a wife to bounce things off of.” McCormack admitted that “embraces were longer than they should have been, absolutely” with one of the girls.
He denied, however, that any of his relationships with the girls, who were age 16 and 17, involved sexual touching or sexual conduct, as several of the girls alleged.
McCormack is charged with single felony counts of child endangering and gross sexual imposition and three counts of sexual battery. He also faces two misdemeanor charges of sexual imposition. The offenses purportedly occurred around 1991 and around 1999. If convicted, he could get several years in prison.
Last summer, the father of one of McCormack’s players confronted him over a text message he sent to the girl that the father felt was inappropriate between a coach and a player. It expressed “love,” McCormack said. The father “choked me pretty good,” McCormack said in the interview.
The playing of the interview and testimony of one of the detectives, Taylor Cleveland of the Ashtabula County Sheriff’s Office, took place to help Judge Marianne Sezon of Ashtabula County Common Pleas Court determine whether the interview should be suppressed from trial.
McCormack’s attorneys said they think the interview should be suppressed because of the way Cleveland and Charles Sullivan, a special agent with the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation, conducted it.
Particularly, defense Atty. Richard Perez asked Cleveland whether he and Sullivan offered a lot of opinions to McCormack regarding what they believe is normal behavior among adults and children, opinions about the accusers’ being truthful and McCormack’s not being truthful.
Cleveland replied that asking yes-and-no questions isn’t effective at getting information from people, but the statements were intended to get McCormack to tell the truth.
McCormack “showed progressively more and more intimate contact with the girls as the interview proceeded,” Cleveland said of the reason the interview continued so long.
The judge will rule on the matter later. The case is set for trial Nov. 17.