Youngstown Daily Legal News

Mercer County teacher to stay behind bars for 20 years for sex with student

JESSICA SHAMBAUGH
Special to the Legal News
Published: November 4, 2014

A former Fort Recovery High School teacher found guilty of sexual battery against a student will be staying in prison after the 3rd District Court of Appeals recently affirmed his 20-year prison term.

Christopher Summers pleaded guilty to eight counts of sexual battery in the Mercer County Court of Common Pleas after one of his former students spent several days testifying about a sexual relationship that spanned two years.

Summers was originally charged with 47 counts in his indictment, including counts of rape, sexual battery, felonious assault, gross sexual imposition and attempted sexual battery.

The state later nolled the rape counts and elected not to proceed on those charges.

Summers pleaded not guilty to the remaining counts and the matter proceeded to a jury trial.

At trial, the victim told the court that she first met Summers when she started high school at Fort Recovery.

She indicated that Summers was her accounting teacher and her basketball coach during her sophomore year.

During that year, the victim started baby-sitting Summers’ children when he and his wife went out.

She also started acting as his coaching assistant for the basketball team after she tore her ACL.

Throughout the year, she said Summers became “nosy” about her personal life and started text messaging her.

She said she started to feel uncomfortable baby-sitting for Summers after he made certain comments.

Nevertheless, she continued to watch his kids when his wife requested it. In June 2010, she was baby-sitting when Summers came home and said he had to show her something.

The victim reported that she followed him to his bedroom and he shoved her onto the bed, held her down, removed her clothes and digitally penetrated her.

She said she told him to stop and let her go, but instead he had sexual intercourse with her.

Afterward, she said Summers “waffled back and forth” between telling her the experience was special and “meant everything to him,” and insisting that she not tell anyone because “he could do anything he wanted to her and that he made sure that he had the control.”

After the incident, the victim said she did not tell anyone what happened because she was scared and embarrassed.

She said she tried to avoid Summers but he used threats and coerced her into meeting him at a local baseball field, where he made her perform oral sex on him. Again, he reminded her not to tell anyone.

The victim said similar incidents continued to happen and Summers would threaten her until she agreed to meet him.

Toward the end of summer, the victim started dating another high school student. She said Summers was angry when he found out and had her meet him on an unfrequented road in Mercer County.

When she arrived, she said Summers screamed at her, telling her that she “belonged” to him while rubbing a knife up and down her leg.

She said he ultimately carved his first initial into her ankle with the knife and used her phone to send a message to himself saying, “I won’t cut myself again,” so that it would look like she had cut herself.

She also testified that they had intercourse again that night.

The victim told the court she did not report any of the incidents because at that point “he had raped (her) and had cut (her), and (she) knew he was capable of just about anything if he was willing to do that.”

On another occasion, the victim recalled Summers coming to her home while her parents were out of town and initiating anal sex.

She said the incident made her sick and physically injured her.

She said the interactions continued throughout her junior and senior years of high school and eventually started happening at school and on basketball trips when she served as his assistant.

In January 2011, Summers again learned that she had a boyfriend. She said he used that opportunity to retrace the ‘C’ he had cut into her ankle, leaving a scar she said she still had at the time of trial.

The summer after she graduated, the victim said Summers’ wife found out about their sexual relationship and started threatening her.

She said Summers continued to meet her behind his wife’s back and threatened to kill himself, “take the victim with him,” and leave a note “making sure that (the victim) was blamed for it.”

After the girl left for college, she said Summers continued to contact her and threaten her, her family and her boyfriend, going so far as to send her photos of her boyfriend’s house.

Eventually, the victim told her mother what was happening and the two went to the police.

During a court recess, Summers reached a plea deal with the state and pleaded guilty to eight counts of sexual battery in exchange for the state dismissing the remaining charges. The trial court accepted the pleas and proceeded to sentencing.

At sentencing, the victim’s friends, Summers’ friends and his wife all testified that they believed Summers was a good person and that the victim was a willing participant in the relationship.

The victim testified that she was “physically, mentally and emotionally” damaged by Summers’ behavior and looked back on her high school years as an “ongoing hell” in which she was isolated from her friends and family.

“I felt like a zombie. I was not living life. I was living hell on earth,” she said.

The trial court ultimately sentenced Summers to an aggregate term of 20 years in prison and he appealed to the 3rd District.

“In Summers’ first assignment of error, he argues that the trial court abused its discretion by imposing consecutive sentences,” Judge Stephen Shaw wrote on behalf of the three-judge appellate panel.

Upon review, however, the judges found that the trial court justified its sentencing decision by noting the serious harm caused by Summers’ crime, its responsibility to protect the public from future crimes and the need to impose a sentence that would adequately reflect the seriousness of the crimes.

“As the trial court made the required statutory findings, Summers’ first assignment of error is overruled,” Judge Shaw stated.

Summers next argued that his 20-year prison term was not proportionate to his offenses.

The judges disagreed. They determined that Summers received only a 30-month sentence for each count, which was half of the maximum permissible term.

The appellate panel further noted that Summers was in a position of trust and used that position to facilitate a sexual relationship with a student that took place over the course of two years and during which he repeatedly engaged in sex acts and used a knife to carve his initial into the girl to show “she was his.”

“Accordingly, based on all the facts and circumstances of this case, even if Summers had not waived this claim, we cannot find that the trial court’s sentence was disproportionate as it was supported in the record and Summers has not met his burden establishing that the sentence was disproportionate,” Judge Shaw wrote, overruling the second assignment of error.

Finding that the trial court’s sentence was properly imposed, Presiding Judge John Willamowski and Judge Vernon Preston joined Judge Shaw in rejecting Summers’ appeal.

The case is cited State v. Summers, 2014-Ohio-4538.

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