Ex-Student Tells Court of Sex Abuse by Coach

The trial of former Compton basketball coach Russell Otis, accused of sexually abusing a player, began Wednesday with a prosecution witness testifying that Otis also had sexual contact with him.

After jurors heard opening statements, the prosecution’s first witness testified that he had been molested several years ago by Otis, who was coach at Dominguez High School.

Ernest Yearby, 27, said Otis performed oral sex on him seven or eight times and fondled him during the year Yearby played basketball for Dominguez High School.

Otis, who has maintained his innocence, is being tried on charges that he molested another former player on at least two occasions.

The prosecution plans to call two other witnesses to testify that they were molested by Otis, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Diana Martinez.

“The witnesses are going to corroborate what the victim said,” Martinez said.

If convicted of the charges--one count each of molestation or annoying a child under 18, copulation with a child under 18, sodomy with a child under 18 and forcible sodomy--Otis could be sentenced up to nine years and eight months in prison, Martinez said.

Yearby said he was playing basketball at a park when he met the coach in the summer of 1988. He eventually played for Otis’ varsity squad and developed a trusting friendship with him, Yearby said.

Soon the coach began to talk sexually with the boy, eventually intimately touching and performing oral copulation on him, Yearby testified.

Although Otis never threatened him or asked him to keep the secret, Yearby said, he did so and transferred to a another high school after one year.

“It was embarrassing,” he said. “I couldn’t tell my peers nothing like that.

“I was sort of between a rock and a hard place,” Yearby added, explaining why he continued allowing the sexual advances. “We didn’t have a lot of things, such as shoes and stuff. I was young and dumb.”

Defense attorney Leonard Levine accused Yearby of fabricating the entire story about his client. He said it was part of a plot to get money from Otis.

“This case is about a simple motive: greed, money,” Levine said in his opening statement.

Levine painted a picture of Yearby as an opportunist who read a news report about the coach’s trouble and thought of a way to capitalize on it.

When he heard about the case, Yearby said, he wondered whether he would be able to benefit financially from a civil suit filed by one of Otis’ former players.

He called the attorney representing the other boy “to see if I was entitled to being compensated,” Yearby said.

Yearby said he now is concerned only with justice.

Otis was fired from his positions as coach and physical education instructor in February. The termination was the result of his failure over 14 years of teaching to obtain permanent credentials.