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	Former Girls Coach Jailed on Underage Sex Charge By Stephanie Slater and Lona O'Connor Palm Beach Post March 17, 2007 http://www.palmbeachpost.com/localnews/content/local_news/epaper/2007/03/17/s1a_BRIANTAYLOR_0317.html Boca Raton — A former athletic director and girls basketball coach at Pope John Paul II High School was arrested early Friday, accused of performing a sexual act on one of his underage players in May 2003, authorities said. Brian Taylor, 28, is alleged to have inappropriately touched the girl on her 16th birthday while they were in his parked car outside a restaurant west of Delray Beach. Taylor, of Boca Raton, is charged with unlawful sexual activity with a minor. He is being held in the Palm Beach County Jail pending a court appearance this morning. After talking to two other former players, authorities said Taylor used remarkably similar techniques for escalating relationships. Text messages from Taylor to the girls went from casual to sexual. He met them in parking lots and had sexual encounters with two girls on separate occasions outside the same Boca Raton nursing home. He asked at least one girl to promise not to tell anyone because it would "ruin his career," she told authorities. "Brian spent an exorbitant amount of time talking with each girl through text messaging, the Internet and on the telephone and developed a friendship with each," Palm Beach County sheriff's Detective Allison Farrington wrote in her report. "He gave each girl the impression they were in a relationship with him and eventually he made sexual advances with each." Taylor resigned from the Catholic school last March. School officials did not return phone calls Friday. A spokeswoman for the Diocese of Palm Beach, which oversees the school, said she could not comment on a criminal investigation. When detectives interviewed the alleged victim, she said Taylor told her on several occasions to keep quiet about the relationship, which started during her sophomore year. It started innocently enough, she said, when she sent him a text message asking what time basketball practice started. Then the text messages changed in tone. In December 2002, Taylor told her "he liked her, she was the perfect girl and he wished she was older," according to an arrest report. A few months later, after driving her to a friend's house, he kissed her. The kissing continued in his office at the school on two other occasions. "Brian had told her he would wait for her when she graduated and turned 18, he wanted to marry her someday and have kids with her, he loved her and cared for her," Farrington wrote in the arrest report. "He would tell her he wished she was his girlfriend." On her 16th birthday, in May 2003, the unlicensed teen hopped in her father's convertible and went to a party at a friend's house in Broward County, she told detectives. Taylor and other Pope John Paul II teachers were there. After she left, Taylor sent her a text message asking if they were going to meet later that night. While she waited for him in the Regency Shopping Center at Yamato and Jog roads, the girl got a phone call from boys basketball coach Delray Brooks, who told her, "I heard you were looking really hot tonight." She asked who said that and was told it was Taylor. Brooks then said: "I just wanted to tell you to be careful tonight." Taylor picked her up and drove to the Applebee's parking lot at Atlantic Avenue and Jog Road, where he performed a sexual act on her until she asked him to stop, according to the report. At school that Monday, Taylor allegedly told her "he had a lawyer and an alibi and he wasn't with her." The girl never told authorities, but last April, her father called them after he saw a letter written to her by a Boca Raton detective who was investigating similar allegations against Taylor made by another player. She was one of two former players authorities interviewed whose stories suggested an identical pattern of serial seduction by Taylor. She confided the alleged affair to Taylor's assistant coach, who urged her to tell her parents. More than a year later, she was having flashbacks. The assistant coach, who began dating her after she graduated from high school, called a sex abuse hot line at the urging of the Rev. Jim Hess, the former spiritual director of the school. Boca Raton police interviewed the girl on Nov. 17, 2005. Five days later, Taylor was put on paid administrative leave from the school. On Jan. 31, 2006, the state attorney's office decided against filing criminal charges due to a lack of evidence and "the wishes of the alleged victim." Taylor resigned as athletic director two months later. The girl's mother strongly disputed the prosecutor's claim that her daughter was reluctant to file criminal charges. She said Friday that her daughter continues to suffer. Now a college student, she has emotional problems and trouble keeping up her grades. "It's still very hard on her," the mother said. A family friend said Friday the mother remains distressed. "She'll take this to her grave." Taylor's former assistant coach, who now works in an unrelated field and wished to remain anonymous, said Friday he and the girls have "taken a lot of heat" since the allegations surfaced. "I'm glad the truth about him finally came out," he said.
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