DATE: Tuesday, November 25, 1997            TAG: 9711250768

SECTION: SPORTS                  PAGE: C1   EDITION: FINAL 
TYPE: Column 

SOURCE: Tom Robinson

                                            LENGTH:   59 lines

HIGH SCHOOL COACH'S SECRET VIDEOS LEAVES DEEP SCARS

With his hidden camera and silent deviance, John Crute stole innocence. The degenerate track coach courted it, gained its trust and then ripped it away from the young girls who became his sexual fantasies.

The tragedy of stolen innocence is that, once gone, it is gone for good. It scars deeply. It does not regenerate. It disappears. Yet in this case we know where it went and who has it - it left a Portsmouth courtroom last week with Crute when he was freed on the wings of legal loopholes.

For years, girls at Manor and Wilson High School trusted this guy, now 47, to help them become better athletes. From at least 1990 to 1995, we now know, he secretly videotaped many of them in various stages of undress in their locker room.

Crute spit on their loyalty. He spit on their trust. He spit on all that is good between a coach and his or her athletes, a bond that in many cases lives and grows a lifetime.

These girls can carry on. They can go to college, get jobs, have families. But if some can never again invest themselves in someone or something as they once did, if their faith has faded to a yellow cynicism, then all the public venom that rains upon Crute's scrawny neck from here on out will not be enough.

And look, the damage oozes on, dragging into the muck more people whose only sin, it seems, was trusting Crute.

Seven of Crute's victims have filed civil suits, each seeking damages from $850,000 to $3 million. They seek money not only from Crute but from the Portsmouth School Board, the district superintendent, a former principal and former athletic director.

Their negligence and lack of supervision, the suits allege, enabled Crute to carry out his scheme for so long. Yes, they hired Crute to teach and coach. Maybe his background and credentials were checked. Or maybe not.

But to know what lurked in Crute's mind? I'm no lawyer, but holding others responsible for Crute's proclivities and clandestine behavior seems a stretch.

The sad irony is that, just as you feel for the girls and their families, you have to feel for the school officials who are being sued by those same girls, desperate for justice.

``There's no way they could've known anything about that,'' said a person who has worked with Crute. ``Or that anybody could have known, for that matter. Nobody knew anything about what he was doing, not even his closest friends.''

The person I spoke with requested anonymity. They are concerned that any public linkage with Crute, however remote, could also get them sued.

This is what Crute has wrought. And this is what it looks like:

It looks like the front-page photograph this newspaper printed last week of one of Crute's victims, a 19-year-old who was 14 when Crute violated her soul. She is seen leaving the court house after a judge let Crute walk unpunished.

She is glancing sideways, her lips parted in a grimace. She is dabbing her right cheek with a tissue. And as she does, a stream of tears glistens behind the lenses of her wire-rimmed glasses.

It is a picture of anguish.

It is a picture of lost innocence.

It is enough to make you cry.

Send Suggestions or Comments to webmaster@scholar.lib.vt.edu