Category: News

Four Cheltenham High School football coaches and six players have been charged in connection with two assaults in the school’s locker room that injured a 15-year-old player and led to the cancellation of two football seasons, Montgomery County prosecutors said Wednesday.

In two violent assaults, District Attorney Kevin Steele said, multiple football players attacked a sophomore on the team, stomped on his chest and groin while wearing cleats, and used a broomstick to poke at his buttocks.

“The assaults on this victim were not typical goofing around by teammates, or horseplay, as some of the coaches in this case called it,” Steele said at a news conference Wednesday. “They were crimes.”

After the attacks, which took place last August and September, Steele said, coaches tried to cover them up.

Head coach Terence Tolbert, 55; associate head coach Darian McFadden, 42; assistant coach Benjamin Johnson III, 45; and volunteer coach Ralph Burnley, 60, have been charged with endangering the welfare of a child and conspiracy. The coaches are no longer with the district.

Two football players, Isaiah Simpson, and Josiah Peeler, both 18, have been charged as adults — Simpson with conspiracy to commit aggravated assault, simple assault, reckless endangerment, and related crimes for his role in the September assault, and Peeler with false swearing for being untruthful to police. The two were 18, Steele said, when the crimes they are charged with took place.

The four other players have been charged as juveniles, and were not identified by prosecutors or named in court records. Two of them face charges of conspiracy to commit aggravated assault and related crimes, because authorities say they took part in the attacks. The other two players are charged with false swearing.

Tolbert, McFadden, Johnson, and Peeler were released on $5,000 unsecured bail. The two other adults had not been arraigned as of Wednesday afternoon. Only two of the defendants, Johnson and Peeler, had attorneys listed in court records.

Johnson’s attorney, Richard J. Fuschino, said his client “has been humiliated by what occurred and absolutely had nothing to do with it.”

“I do believe there is a cover-up, and I absolutely do not believe Benjamin Johnson had anything to do with it,” he said. “In fact, quite the opposite: He went out of the way to cooperate with every investigator.”

Peeler’s attorney, Jessica Mann, did not respond to a request for comment. Attempts to reach the other defendants were not successful Wednesday.

Cheltenham Superintendent Brian Scriven said Wednesday that the district appreciated prosecutors’ work on the case and the filing of criminal charges. “While no legal outcome can erase the harm that was experienced,” he said, “we appreciate that after nearly a year, charges have been announced and those responsible are being held accountable through the criminal justice system.”

Prosecutors say coaches wanted incident ‘kept quiet’

Steele said the charges followed a grand jury investigation in which witnesses described two violent assaults.

The coaches are criminally liable for the assaults, Steele said, because, while they were not present, they learned of the September incident and encouraged the victim not to tell his parents.

Privately, the coaches sent incriminating text messages to one another, Steele said, expressing concern that the incident “has to be handled and kept quiet.”

McFadden, the former assistant coach, wrote “if this gets out we are [expletive]. They will cancel the whole season,” according to the grand jury presentment.

The incidents did lead the district to cancel last year’s football season in October, citing hazing allegations. And in May, it announced the forthcoming season would be canceled as well.

The assaults occurred Aug. 15, after a preseason practice, and Sept. 3, Steele said. He said video footage of the August incident showed several students restraining the victim, while another student poked at his legs and buttocks with a broomstick.

Players are laughing and yelling in the video, and “at least one player is chanting, ‘broomstick him,’” Steele said.

A football player who witnessed the assault, but is not charged in the case, told the grand jury that the use of a broomstick was an apparent reference to a TikTok video featuring a Meek Mill song with the lyrics “broomstick all in his butt, tell him take that,” according to the grand jury presentment.

Steele said there was no evidence that it constituted sexual assault.

Players didn’t take the incidents seriously

Several football players who testified before the grand jury characterized the behavior as “horseplay” and said they did not take it that seriously. Others said the victim had a difficult relationship with his teammates and was viewed by them as “someone who did not follow the rules during practices.”

The Sept. 3 assault, witnesses said, happened after the teen took a pair of shoulder pads from another player’s locker after misplacing his own, an infraction for which the entire team had to do extra conditioning as punishment.

Steele said that investigators did not have a video of the Sept. 3 assault but that multiple players, including Simpson and two of the juvenile defendants, kicked and stomped the victim.

The teen reported told investigators that his teammates were “trying to poke him in the butt with the broomstick,” and that they made contact with his buttocks, Steele said. He said the assault broke up when school buses arrived, and teammates left to board them.

Burnley, one of the coaches, drove the victim home after the attack, and the teen broke down in tears, telling the assistant coach he had been jumped by teammates, the district attorney said.

Burnley then texted coaches in a group chat and called Tolbert, Steele said. McFadden and Tolbert called the teen and “told him not to tell his mother about the incident because they would handle it,” Steele said.

He said the coaches were deliberate and calculating in their decision not to report the assault.

‘Serious concerns about the response’

The incident came to light four days later, when the teen’s mother said he told her he had been jumped by teammates and had pain in his genitals. She said she took her son to an urgent care center and texted the high school’s assistant principal, who called her later that day.

The teen did not tell his mom that his teammates used a broomstick in the attack. He was embarrassed and reluctant to share that detail, the mother said in an interview with The Inquirer in which she spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect the identity of her son.

She said her son told her that his teammates had tried “to mess with his manhood.”

She learned about the broomstick later in September, when Cheltenham Township police called to tell her that someone had called Pennsylvania’s Safe2Say hotline to anonymously report that students had used a broomstick during the attack, according to the teen’s lawyers, Alan Yatvin and Gabrielle Turley.

Sometime in October, the district obtained a video that had been circulating in the community and depicted an assault of the student with a broomstick, the lawyers said.

Investigators initially believed that footage was from the Sept. 3 assault. It was discovered during grand jury testimony in January that the assault was from August, prosecutors said. The teen, who said he was not shown the video until this spring, also identified it as being from August, revealing for the first time that he had been assaulted more than once, according to the lawyers.

“Our client and his family are grateful to the Montgomery County District Attorney’s Office, law enforcement investigators, and the grand jury for their careful and thorough work in bringing these deeply troubling events to light and pursuing charges,” Yatvin said in a statement Wednesday. He added that the grand jury investigation “also raises serious concerns about the response by some within the Cheltenham High School community.”

District accused of failing victim

The school district said in January that an outside investigator had confirmed that a “student-on-student assault” had taken place in the locker room on Sept. 3. The assault was witnessed by nearly 20 students, according to the district, which did not provide details of the attack.

The district faulted inadequate supervision in the locker room, “a failure to prioritize student safety” by coaches and volunteers, and “a toxic and negative culture” within the football program.

District officials have said a Title IX investigation, required by law when sexual assault or harassment is alleged, is ongoing.

Scriven, the superintendent, said in a statement Wednesday that “every report brought to the district’s attention was addressed based on the information available at the time.” He noted that law enforcement and the grand jury had the power to issue search warrants and compel testimony, which “brought information to light.”

In April, the district approved separation agreements with Tolbert and McFadden. Officials say none of the coaches from last season is still affiliated with the district.

The victim, who switched to virtual school after being harassed by peers after the attacks, has continued to struggle, according to his mother. She said he avoids going outside because he fears being taunted about what happened.

During Wednesday’s news conference, Steele criticized the school district and said it had failed the victim.

In its report, the grand jurors noted that they — not the school district’s Title IX investigator — discovered that two separate assaults had taken place.

“I believe the Cheltenham School District has taken the position that they don’t want police in their schools or school resource officers, and so it’s on them to address these issues,” Steele said. “So the grand jury took care of what the school did not.”

In addition to recommending criminal charges against the players and coaches involved in the case, the grand jury filed a separate report calling for a change in state law that would require teachers and coaches to report incidents of hazing as a form of child abuse.

“While the school district claims to ‘protect and prioritize safety and well being,’ their actions in this case say otherwise,” the grand jury report said. “The administration carried out three school-led investigations that were so flawed they failed to even identify that two separate instances of hazing occurred in the locker room.”

News researcher Ryan W. Briggs contributed to this article.