Former Eastside Catholic football coach arrested
September 1, 2009
By J.B. Wogan
Chelan County police arrested a former football coach from Eastside Catholic at his Sammamish home July 21 on charges of sexual assault.Police allege that Joseph Chimenti groped a 17-year-old Eastside Catholic student without her permission. The alleged incident occurred July 11 in Chelan.
Eastside Catholic is a private school for grades 6-12 and is located on 228th Avenue. Chimenti was an assistant football coach at the Sammamish school in 2008.
Patti Finley, a spokeswoman for Eastside Catholic, was quick to point out that the alleged crime bore little relation to the school.
“The alleged event did not happen on school property or during the school year,” Finley wrote in an e-mail.
Finley also said that the school had CICS Employment Services, a third-party investigating corporation based out of Oregon, conduct a background check of Chimenti in October 2008. CICS’ report came back clean.
But the check did not reveal that a case was pending. Four months after the background check, Chimenti pled guilty to a misdemeanor charge in Chesterfield County, Virginia, according to Finley. Chimenti resigned from Eastside Catholic in July, Finley said.
Police reports show that Chimenti was involved in an almost identical incident with a 16-year-old girl in November 2007. In both cases, the girls were sleeping on a couch with Chimenti when they alleged that he assaulted them.
Finley said Eastside Catholic would use the incident as a learning opportunity.
“We will be evaluating our process to make sure that it provides the greatest level of detail that the law permits,” she wrote.
Chimenti did not return a call for comment.
Reporter J.B. Wogan can be reached at 392-6434, ext. 247, or jbwogan@isspress.com. To comment on this story, visit www.SammamishReview.com.
Comments
Got something to say?
