Staff photo / R. Michael Semple Former Poland Township school resource officer Steve Kent, right, listens to testimony during his trial before Mahoning County Common Pleas Judge John Durkin. Next to the Austintown trustee is his defense attorney, John Juhasz.

YOUNGSTOWN — The prosecution rested its case on Friday in the trial of Austintown trustee and former Poland Township school resource officer Steve Kent.

A day after compelling testimony from the victim and the woman who brought the allegations against Kent to light, Ohio Attorney General prosecuting attorneys Kara Keating and Denise Salerno spent Friday questioning law enforcement who worked on the investigation, while defense attorney John Juhasz spent the day poking holes in their case.

Keating and Salerno first called Edward Carlini, the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation’s lead investigator on the case. Poland Township Police called in BCI to take over the investigation on June 7, 2021, one day after Poland Seminary High School Principal Kevin Snyder brought the allegations against Kent to the department’s attention.

Poland Township police Chief Greg Wilson, who testified later in the day, said the department asked BCI to take over because of the potential conflict of interest, given that Kent was a Poland Township officer.

Carlini fielded questions from both prosecution and defense about how the bureau conducted the investigation, such as who they interviewed and when, and BCI’s timeline and considerations for evidence collection and processing. He also offered an overview of what electronic and social media data the investigation yielded and how it was interpreted.

While the state tried to use Carlini’s testimony to establish a foundation for testimony from later witnesses and corroborate statements made by those who testified on Thursday — namely the alleged victim — Juhasz seized on the opportunity to sow doubt in jurors’ minds and set up next week’s defense.

Juhasz questioned Carlini about whether he followed up with the student after interviews with other witnesses revealed inconsistencies in her statements. He asked, for example, whether Carlini questioned the girl about claims that she liked Kent and did not want to cut off social media contact with him, or that Kent is said to have blocked the girl on Snapchat. Carlini said he did not.

He also asked Carlini about the interview conducted by Courtney Wilson, a social worker at the Child Advocacy Center at Akron Children’s Hospital’s Mahoning Campus. Carlini watched the interview from another room as it happened.

“There were some questions that were not answered to our liking as investigators,” Carlini said. “But those were answered in a later interview.”

Carlini did not say what those questions or answers were.

Juhasz also asked why BCI did not ask for tracking data from Kent’s police cruiser and surveillance footage from the school and why BCI took the girl’s phone but not her iPad or laptop as evidence. Finally, Juhasz asked if Carlini encountered any independent sources during the investigation that provided firsthand knowledge about the sexual acts of which Kent is accused. Carlini said the student is the only source of those claims.

The state’s second witness was BCI agent Charles Thomas, who spoke about the data BCI acquired from Life360 — a family tracking app popular with parents for its ability to show the location of children’s mobile devices in real time — and an iPhone tracking app.

Thomas said those companies provided GPS data from both Kent’s and the student’s phones. From that data, BCI was able to produce spreadsheets and ultimately a map, showing where and when the two phones’ locations overlapped on the dates of the alleged sexual acts.

The girl claims that Kent forced her to perform oral sex on him on three occasions: either April 29 or April 30, 2021, in the parking lot at Creekside Fitness in Boardman; and in two different parking areas at the Southern Park Mall on May 20 and June 1, 2021.

The map shows that the data from the apps supports the girl’s claim that she and Kent were in those same general areas on those dates for anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour at a time.

Juhasz, though, halted the state’s momentum when he asked Thomas to calculate, based on the distance scale on the map Thomas had produced for the case, how close the two dots (green for the girl and blue for Kent) actually were on those dates. On one of the dates, the plotted points show the two devices — which both parties presumably were carrying on them — were not closer than 10 meters, and on another they were at least several football fields away.

Thomas did say that the companies that provided the data claim it is accurate to within 10 meters, but that various factors can throw off the precision of the GPS tracking.

Wilson was the state’s last witness for the day. He corroborated Carla Bobbey’s testimony from Thursday, in explaining how events unfolded from the point that Bobbey brought the girl’s claims to Snyder’s attention. However, he also provided Juhasz with more opportunities to establish reasonable doubt.

Juhasz asked again about interviews Wilson conducted with other Poland students in the girl’s circle, none of whom knew about any sexual activity between her and Kent.

Salerno questioned Wilson about some images obtained from one of those students, which show — from a distance — a Poland Township Police cruiser parked next to a small white car in the parking lot at the Church of the Rock in Poland. Salerno seemed to be trying to ask Wilson if those vehicles belonged to the victim and defendant, but Juhasz raised several objections that precluded Wilson from answering.

The state rested its case just after 1 p.m., and Judge John Durkin sent the jurors home for the weekend. Juhasz will begin calling witnesses Monday morning.