Khaberni - A cheerleading coach in California faces a prison sentence of up to 165 years after being convicted of sexually assaulting at least 10 girls, the youngest being 9 years old.
Eric Joseph Christianson, who was a coach at (Magic All-Stars) and an assistant cheerleading coach at Trabuco Hills High School, was convicted of molesting victims while he was a coach for competitive cheerleading and a counselor at summer camps in Orange County in the early 2000s.
The sexual predator - who was first arrested while working in Florida - "hunted" girls at competitions, and often harassed them at his own home.
Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer stated: "For decades, Eric Christianson used the cheerleading studios in Orange County and across the country as a sort of depraved catalog to select his next young victim (target) to molest."
Spitzer added: "He impersonated a trusted coach by daylight, betting on the fact that his young victims would be trusting enough to keep the abuse they were suffering from secret. Sex offenders against children will never stop until law enforcement catches them."
The prosecutors mentioned that the "reign of terror" imposed by this predator in Orange County was not revealed until 2022 after he was arrested in Daytona Beach, Florida, for sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl and engaging in a sexual act during a FaceTime call with three minors.
The victims in the Florida case were all students at "Champion Elite Legacy," the competitive cheer club where Christianson was working at the time.
When news of Christianson's arrest in Florida spread, one of his victims from Orange County reported to the police that she had also been harassed by him when she was only 14 years old.
She accused him of regularly meeting her for lunch at school, taking her to his home or to the beach to molest her, according to the prosecutors.
The investigation uncovered a large amount of evidence proving that he also assaulted seven other girls in Orange County - aged between 9 and 16 - whom he coached between 2002 and 2006.
The other two victims met Christianson through a relative when he was a counselor at an overnight camp run by the YMCA in southern Orange County. Some of the victims told investigators that they felt too ashamed to report the abuse at the time.
Christianson was initially arrested in Kansas in 2022 under an arrest warrant and was extradited to Florida to face charges there. He posted a bail of 300,000 dollars and was released without any restrictions on leaving the state.
He was later arrested again in Fargo, North Dakota, the following year under a criminal warrant related to the Orange County case.
Since then, the "deviant" has been convicted of 11 felonies related to lewd or lascivious acts with a minor under the age of 14, 4 felonies related to lewd or lascivious acts with a child aged 14 or 15, 6 felonies related to sexual acts with a minor under the age of 18, and two felonies related to sexual penetration by a foreign object with a minor under the age of 16.
