Former LA high school athletic trainer pleads no contest to charges tied to sexual assaults of 12 teens

VAN NUYS — A former athletic trainer who worked at two high schools in the San Fernando Valley pleaded no contest Monday to felony charges stemming from the sexual assaults of 12 teenage girls.

Richard Alexander Turner, now 65, was immediately sentenced to 36 years in state prison and ordered to register as a sex offender for life following his plea to one count of rape, three counts of sexual penetration of an unconscious person by fraud, four counts of sexual penetration with force and five counts of sexual battery by fraud, according to Deputy District Attorney Cindy Wallace.

The plea came as a hearing was set to get underway to determine if there was sufficient evidence to allow the case against Turner to proceed to trial.

The crimes occurred with one girl while Turner worked at Van Nuys High School in 2017 and 11 at Birmingham Community Charter High School in 2021 and 2022, Wallace said.

The prosecutor noted that the majority of the crimes occurred on campus while Turner was working as an athletic trainer.

Turner was initially charged in September 2022 involving 10 victims, but charges were subsequently added involving two other student athletes.

“They really wanted to get justice and make sure he couldn’t do this again,” the prosecutor said of the victims, nearly all of whom were in the Van Nuys courtroom.

Turner was initially arrested in September 2022 by Los Angeles police and freed on bond after a Birmingham student reported to a school official that he had inappropriately touched her while she sought treatment for an injury, Los Angeles Police Department Capt. Jeff Bratcher told reporters shortly after the arrest.

Detectives subsequently located a crime report from 2017 in which another student had reported that Turner inappropriately touched her after she reported an injury while practicing basketball at Van Nuys High School, the LAPD captain said in 2022.

That case had been rejected in 2017 by the District Attorney’s Office, which cited a lack of sufficient evidence to prove the case, Bratcher said.

“The reports made by both of these victims were similar and we sought the media’s help in locating witnesses or other victims,” Bratcher told reporters. “In the days following, several minors reported that they had been touched inappropriately by the suspect.”

Turner was re-arrested Sept. 22, hours after he had been released on bond. He has remained behind bars since then, according to jail records.

“The unconsciousness in this particular case really refers to the fact that they may not have immediately been aware that they were being sexually molested,” District Attorney George Gascón told reporters at a September 2022 news conference in which he announced the criminal case against Turner. “There have been some cases where force was used as well.”