TOLEDO, Ohio — Editor's note: The above video originally aired May 12.
Two Toledo police officers were disciplined in 2021 for leaking sensitive information about the FBI investigation into Fr. Michael Zacharias.
Zacharias was found guilty of sex trafficking of a minor and sex trafficking of minors and adults using force, fraud or coercion by a federal jury on May 12.
WTOL 11 has learned that Det. Diana Trevino and Lt. Mark Collins were disciplined after an internal investigation revealed they shared sensitive information about the FBI's plan to serve a warrant on Zacharias in Findlay in August 2020.
Trevino was given a 10-day unpaid leave from work, with five of those days suspended. Collins was given a written reprimand.
FBI officials told Toledo police the leaked information may have allowed Zacharias to destroy evidence in the case before they served the warrant.
According to reports related to the leak investigation, Collins learned on Aug. 10, 2020, from a fellow TPD officer that FBI agents planned to serve a search warrant on a priest. The officer who told Collins was a member of a task force working on the priest investigation and he informed Collins because Collins was responsible for the officer's time card, according to the report.
Collins then told Trevino about the search warrant involving a local priest because at the time she worked with the special victims unit. Police believed that revelations about a priest accused of sexual misconduct may prompt more potential victims to reach out to police, according the report.
The investigation, which concluded in early 2021, determined that Trevino then reached out to a priest friend of hers, Fr. Timothy Ferris. She swore Ferris to secrecy but told him that authorities were preparing to execute a search warrant on Zacharias in Findlay, Ferris told investigators.
"Trevino was not authorized to reveal anything about the active investigation; she was not the case's investigator or involved with it," according to the internal investigation report. "Trevino did not possess the self restraint to differentiate this law enforcement-sensitive information from common knowledge, and she disseminated it. It is unknown why Trevino would discuss details of an open, active investigation with a member of the public for uncertainty of where this information may travel to and to whom."
Ferris then told a fellow priest as well as Monsignor Marvin Borger what Trevino had told him regarding a pending search warrant regarding a priest, according to the report.
Though Trevino initially denied that she even knew the suspect priest's name and did not tell Ferris exactly whom the FBI was investigating, authorities recovered text messages from her to Ferris in which she identified Zacharias by name.
When the FBI initially reached out to TPD for help identifying the female detective they believed had leaked sensitive information, Collins was one of the officers asked to help find the source of the leak. Despite being the person who told Trevino about the upcoming search warrant, he did not tell investigators he had talked with her about the case and he told them he did not know who could have leaked the information.
Investigators concluded that Collins was not authorized to share information about the Zacharias case with Trevino regardless of her job assignment.
"Lt. Collins' actions were not malicious but they compromised a federal investigation and were deemed to be a violation of department policy," according to the report on the internal investigation.
Zacharias, 53, served a priest at several northwest Ohio parishes, including St. Catherine of Siena in Toledo. He was a priest at St. Michael the Archangel Parish in Findlay prior to his arrest in August 2020 for crimes that occurred from approximately 1999 to July 2020.
He was found guilty on five sex trafficking counts - one count of sex trafficking of a minor, one count of sex trafficking of a minor by force, fraud and coercion, one count of sex trafficking of a minor by force, fraud or coercion, and two counts of sex trafficking of an adult by force, fraud or coercion.
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