Former Oakland Youth Coach Charged With 30 Felonies of Molesting A Student

A former youth swim coach in Oakland, California has been charged with 30 felonies of molesting a then-teenage girl in the early 2000s.

David Teel, 54, has been out on $50,000 bail since 2020 when he was charged with 10 counts of molesting a girl whom he coached with the Oakland Barracudas, a now-defunct local club team.

The District Attorney says that Teel’s crimes weren’t thoroughly investigated until the victim began cooperating with authorities in 2019, according to The Mercury News.

The alleged victim testified at Teel’s preliminary hearing on August 9, claiming that she was sexually abused daily for more than a year. As a result, an Alameda County Superior Court judge allowed prosecutors to file 30 felony child molestation charges against the former coach.

The woman testified the abuse started with a forced kiss and escalated to forcible touching and oral copulation that would happen “constantly.”

“Multiple times a day, up to four times a day. At least once a day, but that would be an easy day,” she said on the witness stand, according to The Mercury News.

Teel was banned by USA Swimming in April 2012 over the same allegations. The alleged victim reported the allegations to USA Swimming in 2010, but declined to cooperate with police investigators until 2019.

Teel has pleaded not guilty, and his attorney, Tiega-Noel Varlack, argues that the woman’s testimony hasn’t been verified and added that the decade-long delay in the case impeded Teel’s ability to defend himself against the charges.

“The government has dropped the ball for 10 years,” Teel’s attorney said in court.

“All of the other swimmers have refuted any evidence of wrongdoing by my client,” she would later add.

The alleged victim was the only witness called at the preliminary hearing. She spoke about joining the team in elementary school as a means of getting into college, and described Teel as “intimidating” and a coach who would “withhold coaching” when she disobeyed.

She said that he began massaging her feet during exercise sessions and would insist on one-on-one meetings. It was in one of those meetings where he forcibly kissed her, she said, that was the beginning of what became daily abuse.

“I felt like I was being preyed on, and I felt really trapped more so than ever,” she testified. “And it felt like something was happening, like something premeditated, or something was going to happen. He had just a look in his eyes that was really terrifying.”

“There was a dynamic of ownership, like he could make me do whatever he wanted,” she testified. “For a long time, actually, I remember resisting. And then it just became routine, and I was just a robot or a sex slave, and there was no will involved anymore.”

The woman added that she reported the abuse to USA Swimming in 2010 after seeing media reports about other sexual abuse cases within swim clubs. But an Oakland police investigator gave her the impression that her identity would become public if she cooperated, so she held back for nine more years.

During cross-examination, she testified that Teel sexually abused her while she was in college, after turning 18, but the defense painted those as consensual encounters.

Varlack argued that there was evidence of one count of inappopriate touching “at most,” and that prosecutors shouldn’t “get a free-for-all to just come in and throw spaghetti at the wall and hope that it will stick with respect to when this stuff happened.”

Judge Kimberly Colwell, however, allowed prosecutors to file 30 felony charges.

“The testimony was overwhelming in terms of the number…it sounds like it was a daily, if not multiple times-a-day occurrence,” Colwell said.