Newest accuser: Youth track coach raped her at 12 and in a Miami Gardens park closet
Since Miami Gardens Xpress track coach Darius Lawshea’s arrest on sexual battery and molestation charges in October, three more women say Lawshea violated them in similar ways when they were girls.
The most recent accuser, in a case filed in Miami-Dade criminal court on Tuesday, said Lawshea first put his finger in her vagina when she was 12. They were in his truck, she said, according to an arrest affidavit.
Lawshea remains in Miami-Dade county jail, granted no bond on some of what’s become a stack of charges: seven counts of sexual battery on a minor by an adult; three counts of lewd and lascivious molestation of a child aged 12 to 16; two counts of lewd and lascivious molestation by an adult of a child under the age of 12; and false imprisonment.
Lawshea has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
Many Miami Gardens Xpress runners and parents considered “Coach D” a family friend and positive community influence. That includes the mother whose daughter said when she was 12, “Coach D” gave her a ride to middle school “and while in the parking lot, he told her that he loved her.”
Then, he violated her with his fingers.
When she was 15, she told police, Lawshea got her into a closet at Betty T. Ferguson Park, put his tongue in her mouth and again violated her with his fingers.
The fourth alleged victim said she was a middle-schooler on a track road trip to Clearwater in 2012 when Lawshea touched her vagina. He did the same, she said, while driving her home from school and, when she was 15, a night she stayed at his apartment “because he was her only form of transportation to the track and field events,” the arrest affidavit said.
Lawshea’s initial arrest didn’t splash across South Florida media until Monday, Oct. 26, but word got around current and former Miami Gardens Xpress families after he turned himself in on Oct. 25. An arrest affidavit says family members told one mother to talk to her daughter because she’d been in the program, which has no official affiliation with the city of Miami Gardens.
The daughter told her mother what she told police the next day, according to an arrest affidavit. One day when she was 12 or 13, Lawshea picked her up from middle school, as normal, but tried to kiss her in his truck. He then took her to his apartment and told her to get naked on his bed. He violated her orally, she said, and attempted to do so with his penis.
She said over the next two years, he touched her breast, vagina and violated her orally “multiple times.”
“The victim stated she never told anyone because the suspect was an adult and she didn’t believe anyone would believe her.”
This story was originally published November 12, 2020 at 2:55 PM.
