FORT WORTH, Texas _ A former gymnastics coach was sentenced on Friday to 50 years in prison for sexually assaulting young gymnasts.
Skipper Crawley, 53, of Kemp, pleaded guilty to four counts of aggravated assault of a child.
Once charges were filed in August 2018, Crawley fled Texas and was arrested in Indiana.
On Friday, many of Crawley's past victims shared emotional statements of what the coach put them through.
"They were all children who dreamed of being Olympians, and believed the defendant would help them get there," said Tarrant County Assistant District Attorney Darren DeLaCruz in a news release. "He used his position of authority to isolate them, and used their dreams against them."
Crawley was an instructor at Sokol Gymnastics in Fort Worth when reports surfaced he had sexually assaulted three young girls during practices.
After his arrest, several adult victims also came forward and reported being sexually abused by Crawley when they were young gymnasts when he was a coach in Norman and Tulsa, Okla., in the 1990s, prosecutors said.
He still faces charges in Oklahoma, said Sam Jordan, a spokeswoman with the Tarrant County criminal district attorney's office, in a Friday email.
"The defendant preyed on his victims from the start," DeLaCruz said. "Instead of being a trusted coach and mentor, he sexually abused them."
In all, Crawley was accused of abusing 11 girls in Texas and Oklahoma, prosecutors said Friday.
In Fort Worth, Crawley, also known as "Skip," sexually abused several young gymnasts who were members of the same team in 2017 and 2018.
Tulsa County prosecutors were able to file charges in the Tulsa cases in 2018 because Oklahoma law allows victims to come forward with molestation allegations until they reach age 45, according to KOTV-TV in Tulsa.
Each of the women told Tulsa detectives they had been sexually abused by Crawley from the summer of 1993 until 1997, according to an arrest warrant obtained in 2018 by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
Crawley was fired from Tulsa World Gymnastics in 1997 after parents alerted the owners of the gym about allegations of "inappropriate touching."
The women told Tulsa detectives that the sex abuse occurred during stretching time either during practice or at the end of practice, according to the warrant. Some of the women said Crawley touched their breasts while stretching at various gymnastics meets around Oklahoma.
The youngest was 8 years old and the oldest was 10 years old when they were coached by Crawley in the 1990s, the warrant says.
