Two new names have been added to the USA Swimming Permanently Suspended or Ineligible list this week. L. John Trites and Joe Weber both exhausted their 30-day appeal periods and were added to the list on Tuesday, with the bans dating back to February 25th.
Lorrie John Trites is a fugitive that is wanted by the FBI. The former swim coach from Franklin and Marshall College is believed to be “Armed and Dangerous.”
Trites is on the FBI’s “Most Wanted” list for allegedly making video and voice recordings of young female swimmers as they changed in a locker room between December, 1997 and February 1998.
Trites has been on the run for 15 years, though he was just now added to the USA Swimming banned list. According to his public FBI Most Wanted profile, “he was charged with six counts of violating the Pennsylvania Wiretapping and Electronic Surveillance Control Act in a local arrest warrant issued on March 10, 1998. He was then charged with unlawful flight to avoid prosecution in a federal arrest warrant issued in April of 1999, in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.”
His connection with the swimming community has been well-publicized by the FBI; his file refers to Trites as being “an avid swimmer” and that he “may be involved in some way with the swimming community.”
For more information, listen to this FBI podcast about Trites from July of 2011.
The other addition is Joe Weber. Weber is the coach who had been on deck with the Somerset Valley, New Jersey YMCA until last fall, when the club found out that he had spent 5 years in jail in the 1990’s after pleading guilty to having oral sex with a 14-year old girl. The incident took place while coaching at the Germantown Academy Aquatics Club, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Weber escaped detection during roughly six years working with the YMCA club.
When asked on the issue, then USA Swimming spokesperson Jamie Fabos Olsen said that he was never a USA Swimming registered coach (she is no longer with the organization). She said that their only record of him was that he was a non-coach/non-athlete member of the organization from September of 2009 through December of 2010, with non-athlete members only required to have their background checks done beginning in January of 2011.
Also recently added was Paul Vanlieshout, who had some NCAA coaching experience and spent some time abroad. Looks like he violated some of the sexual misconduct codes in Louisiana, but I found no report of the incident.
Here’s the full list:
http://www.usaswimming.org/ViewMiscArticle.aspx?TabId=1963&mid=10011&ItemId=5107