Somerville Man Charged with Videotaping Boys at Immaculata Hs Had "Mandatory Showers" Policy As Coach, Former Players Say
By Mark Spivey
Harry Osterhoudt never was bothered by his former Montgomery High School basketball coach’s insistence that his players shower immediately after every game and practice. Those feelings changed somewhat when that coach, Patrick Lott, 54, was arrested late last week, charged with more than 50 criminal offenses for allegedly videotaping 15- and 16-year-old boys showering together at Immaculata High School — where the current borough resident and Bernardsville Middle School assistant principal has volunteered with academic and athletic programs for years. “I remember the mandatory showers,” Osterhoudt said Friday. “Before, you looked back and it was like, “Ok, you smelled, it was after a game.’ Now you’re looking back like, ‘Ahhh.’” Osterhoudt, who today plays for the Hudson Valley Kingz of the Atlantic Coast Professional Basketball League, was a senior guard during Lott’s final year of coaching at Montgomery. It was after the 2001-2002 season that Lott abruptly resigned as head coach of the Cougars wrestling and boys basketball teams despite achieving impressive success in both capacities during the previous decade, winning multiple Skyland Conference Raritan Division titles in the former sport and advancing to three NJSIAA sectional finals in the latter. But Osterhoudt and several other people who once played, studied and coached alongside Lott told the Courier News this week that the man accused of a shocking crime long has enjoyed an apparently well-deserved reputation for long ranking among the area’s most caring, energetic and thoughtful educators. “I didn’t believe it until I saw it on the news,” Osterhoudt said of learning about the charges against Lott. “I was in shock.” “He was a good teacher,” he added. “And to me, he was a good person.” A respected figure News of the charges emerged Wednesday morning, and Lott was arraigned in Superior Court Wednesday afternoon, charged with videotaping 15 alleged victims between Jan. 1, 2008 and Dec.13. Prosecutors said they were alerted to the matter by the Diocese of Metuchen and Immaculata officials, who had received allegations of inappropriate conduct by Lott. Bail was set at $500,000, and as of Friday, Lott remained in Somerset County Jail. The case is expected to be presented to a grand jury for possible indictment early in 2012, officials have said. “My first thoughts when I saw Mr. Lott’s picture (on the news) was that Mr. Lott caught the guy and that he was the hero,” recalled Kyle Leivonen, a 20-year-old Bedminster resident and 2010 graduate of Bernards High School, where Lott worked as an assistant principal from 2003 to 2009. “I had a hard time getting it through my head that (he) was the one (charged) for such a disgusting crime.” “When I had gotten to work later that day and I started telling former classmates, no one believed me at first,” added Leivonen, who works at the Kings supermarket in Bedminster. “I had to physically show them the article to get them to believe me.” Also currently a student at Raritan Valley Community College in Branchburg and a member of the Far Hills-Bedminster Fire Department, Leivonen described Lott as “far and away” his favorite high school administrator. It wasn’t an uncommon opinion to hold, he noted. “He was always the nicest guy whenever you would see him in the hallways, and lots of times he would go through lunch tables and talk with all the kids while they ate,” Leivonen said. “He had the strongest connection on a personal and professional level ... and was always very understanding with students with minor mess-ups. (Lott) was, all around, one of the nicest guys you could ever meet.” “Now, it makes you think, just why was he so close and friendly with all the students?” Leivonen added if the charges against Lott are proven true. “Was it because he was just a nice guy, or were we filling some sick fantasy?” The news of the allegations against Lott hit home for Jeff Lubreski, the Plainfield High School boys basketball coach whose son Ryan played basketball at Immaculata during his freshman year of high school before transferring to Blair Academy in Warren County. Lubreski coached for nearly two decades in South Plainfield, winning a pair of Greater Middlesex Conference and NJSIAA sectional titles, before serving as a volunteer assistant at Immaculata during his son’s playing time there, the 2006-2007 season. Lubreski said he helped videotape games with Immaculata coach Michael Frauenheim’s brother — a role apparently filled by Lott starting sometime during the next several seasons. Lott allegedly was videotaping students in the Immaculata showers as early as Jan. 1, 2008, according to court papers. “It’s disturbing,” Lubreski said of the allegations. “That is definitely the word.” But Lubreski — who said he didn’t recall seeing Lott often, if at all, at Immaculata during the 2006-2007 season — agreed with other coaches who have said that Lott was known in Central Jersey youth basketball circles for being a “stand-up guy” who did things the right way. “I didn’t know him very well, to be honest ... but it was known by reputation that he did a nice job (at Montgomery) and was pretty well respected in the profession,” Lubreski recalled, having lost to Lott’s Montgomery squad as coach of South Plainfield in a March 2000 NJSIAA Central Jersey Group II quarterfinal matchup. “It was a shock when I read (about the allegations) in the paper. The only things I ever heard from other coaches were good things about how he ran his program.” Much of Lott’s career as an educator already is well documented: having worked for the Watchung Hills Regional High School Board of Education during the late 1980s and early 1990s, he taught television production classes at Montgomery High School for much of the time he coached basketball there, a period lasting from 1993 into 2002. In July 2002 he announced that he had accepted a position as the Montgomery school district’s coordinator of audio/visual and distance learning, but in an interview with the Courier News he didn’t spell out precisely why he was stepping down as coach. “I enjoyed the interaction with the kids. You become attached to the kids you coach,” Lott said at the time. “There’s never a good time to move on.” But that’s just what Lott did after spending one year as an administrator in Montgomery, moving on to Bernards High School for the next six years before accepting his current administrative post at Bernardsville Middle School. He isn’t believed to have served as head coach of a sports program at any school since 2002. Signs of trouble Efforts to contact four current or former Montgomery schools officials this week failed. Bernie Demsky of Manville, the former athletic director while Lott was coach of the high school, and Stuart Schnur, the schools superintendent at the time, did not return phone calls, while current Montgomery High School Principal Paul Popadiuk — who was the school’s girls basketball coach while Lott was the boys coach — could not be reached for comment. Laurie Navin, who served as the township’s Board of Education president toward the end of Lott’s tenure at the high school, declined comment when reached at her Princeton home on Friday. Serving with the board at the same time, from 1994 through 2000, was current U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, who once lived in Montgomery. “I just don’t have my thoughts gathered (enough) to talk to a reporter,” Navin explained. “The whole thing is rather unsettling, and I’d rather be composed before I talk to the press.” A fuzzy area on Lott’s resume is his history at Immaculata, where he at least is known to have been involved with the freshman football program during parts of the 1990s. According to a letter sent home to parents Tuesday by Immaculata principal Regina Havens, Lott was “a longtime volunteer and coach” at the school, but his exact responsibilities have not been detailed. A former athlete who played on that team under Lott and asked not to be identified by name echoed Osterhoudt’s comments that some team rules that at the time only seemed mildly odd now are taking on a more sinister tone in retrospect. “He would always make players shower together, and he would shower with us. A lot of us thought it was creepy, but he was such a nice guy that we just dismissed it,” the player said. “He would call showering together ‘team bonding.’ After talking to current football players at the school, they say the same thing, that he always tried to get them to shower together and called it ‘bonding.’” “I wouldn’t be shocked if this was going on for a while,” he added. Others were similarly incredulous. “I would like to say that I was shocked to read the news about him, but to be perfectly honest, I wasn’t,” said Nathan Cox-Bien, a 2003 Montgomery High School graduate and current resident of New Hope, Pa. “I always got a bad vibe from him, though I was always polite and cordial towards him, and he to me.” The 27-year-old, who today works as a chimney sweep in Mercer County, said Lott was his sixth-grade natural science teacher at Orchard Road Elementary School, adding that he later ran into him with some regularity at the high school. “Lott was one of those ever-present teachers (in high school). He was involved in a lot of extracurricular activities, and taught the (audio-visual) class. As such, he was involved in all the school plays, musicals and music performances in some capacity, usually in the light booth,” Cox-Bien said, adding that Lott had a reputation as a well-liked, relatively laid-back teacher. “I was in the high school chorus and had a friend who was in the (audio-visual) class,” he added. “so I knew Mr. Lott and would stop and chat with him fairly regularly in the hallway.” Little was publicly known about the investigation into Lott until his arrest a little more than a week ago. But according to a report in The Bernardsville News, an ambiguous message posted on Lott’s Facebook page two weeks prior to his arrest date might have indicated that he knew trouble was coming (the page since appears to have been taken down). “I have always given my best and tried to be a great role model,’’ the message read, according to the report. “No one is perfect. Thanks for the memories.’’ Hearing about the saga made Osterhoudt, for one, think back to the last time he saw Lott, who through his attorney and family has yet to make any public comments about the allegations against him. “I bumped into him in Somerville, it was over on Davenport Street. That was about three or four years ago,” said Osterhoudt, who today splits time between his basketball travels and helping his mother run a coffee shop in downtown Louisville, Ky. “We were just catching up on what he’d been up to and what I’d been up to,” Osterhoudt recalled. “It’s just crazy. Everybody changes, I guess. You can’t always really tell about people.” Mark Spivey; 908-243-6607; mspivey@njpressmedia.com
|
.
Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.