(WWJ) – A 20-year-old man who worked as a volunteer basketball coach at an Oakland County middle school is facing federal charges for allegedly having sex with a 12-year-old girl and filming it.
An 11-page complaint filed Wednesday by an FBI agent in federal court claims Daveughn Gray met the girl at an unidentified middle school where he was an unofficial volunteer assistant basketball coach for the boy’s basketball team.
The affidavit alleges back in January Gray bought the girl Uber rides to and from his house so he could have sex with her. Gray claims he had bought the rides so she could have sex with his “middle-school-aged close friend,” according to the complaint.
Faculty from the unidentified middle school contacted law enforcement in early March after learning the 12-year-old girl, born in 2010, had sex with Gray, according to the court document. School officials said a student at the school let the 12-year-old girl borrow her phone and when she got it back she found several videos and images of the girl engaged in sexual activity with an adult male, the affidavit says.
The student then took a screenshot of the video and shared it in an Instagram group chat with several other students, who then showed it to a teacher at the school. While no faces were shown in the video, according to the complaint, the teacher told authorities the girl in the video had a distinctive hair style matching the 12-year-old girl’s.
A parent of one of the students involved in the group chat told investigators they had previously seen Gray “flirting” with other middle school students and “warned him not to behave inappropriately with the students,” according to the complaint.
The 12-year-old girl told investigators she had met Gray while waiting to be picked up from cheer practice. She recognized him as someone who helped with the boy’s basketball team and he told her he was 15 years old and she told him her age. He allegedly eventually contacted her on Instagram and Snapchat, where he told her he liked her.
While at a sleepover at a friend’s house, according to the affidavit, Gray reached out to her to see if she wanted to come over to his house. He then bought a ride share for her to be taken to his house, as well as the return trip to her friend’s.
When she got to his house, Gray “continually asked her to do ‘it,’” according to the complaint and they eventually had vaginal sex, and Gray recorded some of the activity on his cell phone, the complaint alleges.
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The girl’s statements to investigators “demonstrate that [then] 19-year-old Gray used his access to the middle school as an unofficial assistant basketball coach to meet and communicate with at least one middle-school-aged child outside of school.”
A search warrant at Gray’s home executed on Wednesday led to the recovery of a cellular device. He told investigators the only girl he communicated with outside of school was the 12-year-old victim, but he claimed it was “only so he could talk to her for his close friend, who was another middle school student.”
He admitted to buying her an Uber ride, but claimed it was for her to “come over and have sex with his middle-school-aged close friend” and claims he left the house in the middle of the night when she came over, before returning and sending her home in an Uber, according to the complaint.
Gray told authorities it must have been his close friend who took the videos because he “always puts his face in his sex videos so that someone watching it would know the sex was consensual,” the complaint says.
But federal authorities noted he continued to communicate with the girl about their encounter over the course of the next week, and it couldn’t have been another student because “the conversations occurred throughout all hours of the day and night, over the course of more than a week.”
“This makes it extremely unlikely that his friend had control of Gray’s phone for that long a time period,” the complaint says.
Digital evidence discovered in the search warrant shows “numerous videos of Gray’s sexual encounters,” including the one with the 12-year-old. While that video didn’t show Gray’s face, it shows a “distinct black and white bracelet” also seen in other sex videos taken within days of the encounter with the victim.
The complaint concludes that there’s probable cause to believe Gray produced, possessed and distributed child pornography.
Authorities noted at the time of the search warrant on Tuesday, Gray had an active felony arrest warrant for embezzlement and larceny out of Romulus, while working for Amazon.
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