BY DAN HILDEBRAN
Monitor Editor
STARKE— The State Attorney’s Office dropped three felony counts against a former Bradford High School volleyball and softball coach and agreed to the defendant pleading to two misdemeanors.
Lainie Kay Rodgers, 24, was arrested last October for an authority figure engaging in or soliciting in lewd conduct with a student and transmitting information harmful to minors.
In March the State added the additional charges of using a computer to solicit a minor and lewd or lascivious molestation on a person 12 years of age or older but under than 16 years of age by an offender 18 or older.
Later in March, after Rodgers’s attorney, Bobi J. Frank, pointed out that at the time of the alleged offenses, the victim was 16, and not under age 16 as the statue requires, the State dropped the molestation charge.
In a Wednesday, April 27 hearing that was originally scheduled for Circuit Judge James Colaw to hear arguments on defense motions to dismiss charges and suppress evidence, the State announced it was dropping all three remaining felonies. Instead, Rodgers, now 25, pleaded to two counts of contributing to the dependency of a minor. Her plea agreement with the State prohibits her from contacting the victim’s family and from engaging in non-supervised contact with minors other than her family.
The agreement also calls for two, consecutive terms of one year of probation. However, she may apply for early termination of probation after one year.
Assistant State Attorney Lua Lepianka said during Rodgers’s change of plea that the defendant engaged in two different acts of contributing to the dependency of a minor.
“Specifically,” Lepianka said in the hearing, “that she engaged in a relationship with a minor that overstepped the permissible bounds of a relationship between an authority figure and a student, and she permitted a minor to engage in kissing and-or fondling without bringing it to the attention of school administration or a parent.”
Zero proof
During the hearing, Frank told Colaw that the State’s actions were the result of facts uncovered in her earlier motion for dismissal and motion to suppress.
In Franks’s April 14 motion requesting the judge to dismiss all charges against her client, Frank wrote that the State had no proof that Rodgers transmitted any information harmful to minors.
She wrote that the State’s information accused the defendant of texting a photo of a naked buttocks to the victim.
“The photograph identified as the ‘naked buttocks’ photograph relied upon in the amended information is a photograph of a buttocks with underwear which was merely located on the defendant’s camera roll,” Frank wrote, “with zero proof of transmission to (the victim). (The victim) denied receiving any transmissions from the defendant that were sexual or harmful in nature under the law.”
The sheriff’s office investigation of Rodgers began after one student told Bradford High School administrators, she saw a sexually explicit text message from Rodgers to the victim on the victim’s cell phone.
However, in her deposition, the victim said the witness was probably lying.
During the deposition, Frank asked the victim about her relationship with the witness: “Are you friends with her?”
“No ma’am,” the victim replied.
Frank: “Okay, are you aware that she claims she saw something/?”
Victim: “Yes, ma’am.”
Frank: “Okay. First of all—she wouldn’t have any way to know who transmitted anything to you on your cell phone. Right?”
Victim: “No, ma’am.”
Frank: “Okay. And she was lying when she said that?”
Victim: “Yes ma’am. Probably.”
The victim also testified that even though she tried to advance her friendship with Rodgers into a romantic one, the coach refused her advances.
“Okay,” Frank said to the victim during the deposition. “You had a crush on Lainie Rodgers, right?”
“Yes, ma’am,” the victim replied.
Frank: “She continuously and consistently advised you that you could be good friends, you could be best friends, but you could not be in a romantic relationship?
Victim: “Yes, ma’am.”
Frank: “And each time that you made those advances or attempted to turn a friendship into a romantic relationship, she said, ‘We cannot do this?’”
Victim: “Yes, ma’am.”
The lawyer also got the victim to affirm that Rodgers didn’t swear much, had a strong faith and considered it inappropriate when others cussed around her. The victim said that on one occasion, when she told Rodgers she drank an alcoholic beverage at a lake, the coach advised her that was a bad decision.
“Right,” Frank said to the victim. “As a matter of fact, her primary role in your life was, like I said, an older friend, a bigger sister?
“Yes, ma’am,” came the reply.
“Keep you on track, right?
“Yes ma’am.”
“Try to help you out?
“Yes, ma’am.”
‘I bragged to my friends about it’
In the written statement she gave to Bradford Sheriff’s Detective Jason Crews, the victim said she and Rodgers developed a relationship after the victim asked the coach for some one-on-one help so the student could earn a college softball scholarship.
“Then it turned into a relationship that shouldn’t have happened,” the victim wrote. “I regret it. We kissed multiple times, but she never touched me. I only touched her breast, nothing else.”
“I bragged to my friends about it, even though I shouldn’t have,” the student continued. “I kept egging the flirting on even though I knew it was wrong.”
The student added that Rodgers grew increasingly nervous about the relationship.
“I kept telling her no one would catch us,” the student wrote. “She was scared the whole time and the relationship ended.”
In her own written statement, Rodgers also described the relationship as blossoming from the one-on-one coaching sessions.
‘We hung out at the softball field,” Rodgers wrote, “hitting and going to get some food afterwards.”
The former coach added that over time, the pair grew closer, and she misled the victim into believing that she wanted a romantic relationship with the student when she in fact, did not.
“Sexual messages were sent back and forth, but me and (the victim) did not have sexual encounters,” Rodgers wrote. “We talked about how it would be, but we did not take action.”
Sheriff defends investigation
In her motion to suppress, Rodgers’s lawyer claimed that Crews coerced the written statement from the defendant, by telling her, after reading her Miranda rights to her, that if she asked to consult with an attorney during her interview with Crews, it would make her look guilty.
During a deposition Frank asked Crews if he made the statement to Rodgers.
“I think she asked what my personal opinion was, and I told her I couldn’t give my personal opinion,” Crews responded to Frank, “but I would say, on prior experiences, yeah, I could have answered something like that.”
Sheriff Gordon Smith said he saw nothing wrong with Crews’s statement to Rodgers as described in the deposition, adding that defendants ask him frequently for his personal opinion on such topics as what lawyer to hire or what tow truck company to call.
“I’m allowed to give my personal opinion,” Smith said.
Frank also claimed Crews conducted an illegal search of Rodgers’s car by grabbing her cell phone from the vehicle without the defendant’s consent and without first obtaining a search warrant.
Smith said that Crews doesn’t know anything about that claim and added that if everything in the defense motions were true, why didn’t Rodgers and her lawyer allow the judge to rule on the motions to dismiss and suppress instead of agreeing to a plea.
“When all the evidence is against your client, you attack law enforcement.” Smith said of defense attorneys. “It happens all the time.”
Smith said he sees nothing wrong with Crews’s actions and said the investigator did the best he could with what he had.
“It’s tough when you have a victim that is not as cooperative as you would like,” the sheriff said.
Smith added that as rumors of their relationship swirled around the school and community, both Rodgers and the victim bought new cell phones, getting rid of any incriminating evidence that may have been on the older devices.
The sheriff said that in the court of social media, his office has been accused of both sweeping Rodgers’s case under the rug and targeting her family with his investigation.
“We didn’t initiate this investigation,” Smith said. “The school came to us.”
Smith also emphasized that Crews did not arrest the defendant after completing his inquiry, but instead forwarded a sworn complaint to the State Attorney’s Office which made the decision to obtain an arrest warrant and prosecute the case.
