The teenage girl said she was "trapped for three years" in a prison of anger, "feeling terrified and ashamed." But she said nothing about the Elk River youth soccer coach, who is now charged with sexually assaulting her when she was 14.
Eric James Hawkins, a coach with no criminal background, had been banned by the Minnesota Youth Soccer Association (MYSA) at the time of the alleged assaults. But with no criminal history and without a requirement to list a suspension by the MYSA in a background check, there were no red flags for officials at two metro-area school districts where Hawkins worked as a coach in the past two years.
Background checks also would not have turned up a string of soccer-related lawsuits and interleague intrigue involving Hawkins, who authorities say changed his name years ago.
But a week after Hawkins, 44, appeared in Sherburne County District Court and the charges were reported in the national media, officials in the Rockford and Robbinsdale school districts, who had run background checks on the coach, were stunned.
"We did a thorough background check," said Michael Smith, superintendent of the Rockford School District, where Hawkins coached the boys' soccer team last fall. Smith said Hawkins will no longer coach at Rockford High School. The school district on Monday sent letters to families of the high school boys' soccer team, alerting them to Hawkins' status.
Hawkins' Minneapolis attorney, Mark Jason Miller, said Tuesday he welcomes the opportunity to show that "all these allegations are not true." He noted that even after Hawkins was charged on Nov. 21, he was allowed to leave Minnesota to work in South Carolina. Hawkins continues to hold residence in Elk River, as he has in the past when he has worked in other states for months at a time, Miller said.
At Robbinsdale Cooper High School, Hawkins was a volunteer assistant boys soccer coach two years ago. "He was a volunteer, but he did go through our whole system of checks," said John Oelfke, activities director at the high school. "I just don't know how you can predict these kinds of actions with nothing in the background."
And when TestQuest, a Chanhassen technology company, used a recruiting service to hire Hawkins in November 2006 as a network architect engineer, "the usual background checks were done and there were no issues with him," said Sarat Kakumanu, Hawkins' supervisor until Hawkins left the company in November.