LUCAS COUNTY, Ohio — The trial of Ronald "Donnie" Stevens, the former Ottawa Hills employee charged with multiple child sex crimes, including counts of rape, sexual battery and gross sexual imposition, continued on Thursday.
Prosecutors called multiple alleged victims of Stevens to share their emotional testimony.
All of the alleged victims were friends of Stevens' son who would come over for sleepovers.
In their horrifying testimonies each of the witnesses described a history of molestation, specifically in the summer and fall of 2019-going into their 8th grade year when, according to the alleged victims, Stevens repeatedly molested them before bed in his basement. One described Stevens as "a monster."
The following is a portion of an exchange between one of the alleged victims and the prosecutor on Thursday:
"When he was doing that to you, how did it make you feel?" asked the prosecutor.
"Uh scared, I didn't really know what to do about it," said the victim.
"Did you ever tell him to stop?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"I didn't know what would happen if I did."
"Were you afraid of what would happen if you did?"
"Yes."
"Were you afraid no one would believe you?"
"Yeah."
In their testimonies, the alleged victims said their relationship with Stevens didn't start out as abusive. They described Stevens as father figure; taking them to sporting events, working out with them, and being someone they could confide in. Later, they said, Stevens started taking advantage of that trust and began abusing them.
"Before baseball games, he was my baseball coach, he kind of stretched me out which I thought was weird but I did it. And then I think when I would get in bet he would kind of like - put his hands on my legs and slowly kind of work his hands around and kind of like massage me," one of the alleged victims, recounted.
Also in their testimonies, multiple victims claimed that Stevens coerced nude pictures from them over Snapchat. On Thusday, the prosecution said that when the police recovered his phone and went through Stevens' deleted search history, one of his searches contained the phrase, "can Snapchat recover old files if they have a warrant?"
Meanwhile, the defense focused on establishing that these alleged incidents occurred in Stevens' house while his wife and kids were home, yet the alleged incidents were never seen by any of the family members.
A day earlier, on the second day of witness testimonies, four more people took the stand.
The first was an ex-girlfriend of one of the victims. She said Stevens was practically a father figure to the victim, always checking in on him and wondering where he was.
"Sometimes I know Donnie would want him to stop by his house after we were done hanging out or see him or go out and drive and things like that," said the ex-girlfriend.
The witness went on to recall a time the victim got home after being in the hospital for some time. She said he wasn't quite himself and was acting odd any time Stevens came up in conversation.
"He kept hinting that there was something he wanted to talk about where that was concerned, and a couple weeks later he did sit me down and let me know through a note that Donnie is the reason that he went, and he had been sexually abusing him," she said.
A second witness with the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation said she is the lab personnel that looked at DNA samples from evidence in the case.
A third witness, the Director of Technology and Operations at Ottawa Hills Local Schools, talks about blackout film Stevens put over his office windows so no one could see through.
The employee was asked, "If a teacher or administrator were to walk by and something illegal was going on they would not be able to see it?" and confirmed that "No, no one could see."
The fourth witness, an investigator with the Lucas County Prosecutors Office, shared video of Stevens and a victim's encounter during school.
"At 1:30 he's speaking to someone inside the room then traveling on east to someone in the transition hallway," the investigator said.
The trial resumes on Friday, September 17th.