Austintown Township trustee and former Poland school resource officer Steve Kent, right, sits with his attorney, John Juhasz, on Monday shortly after a Mahoning County Common Pleas Court jury issued its verdict in Kent’s trial.

YOUNGSTOWN — Austintown Trustee Steve Kent walked out of the Mahoning County Courthouse on his own recognizance Monday — but a convicted felon nonetheless.

Jurors found Kent not guilty on three counts of sexual battery, after prosecutors failed to persuade them that Kent coerced a student at Poland Seminary High School to perform sex acts with him on three occasions in 2021 while he was the school resource officer.

After less than one hour of deliberation, jurors did convict Kent on one count of tampering with evidence, a third-degree felony. The conviction could render him ineligible for service as a police officer or a township trustee.

Common pleas court Judge John Durkin will sentence him at a later date. Kent faces up to three years in prison and up to a $10,000 fine.

State prosecutors presented evidence that Kent performed a factory reset on his phone June 6, 2021, a day after Poland parent Carla Bobbey told Kent that the student made the sexual battery claims and that Bobbey intended to notify the authorities and the girl’s father.

The prosecution rested its case Friday. Monday morning, defense attorney John Juhasz brought a motion for Durkin to acquit Kent as he asserted the state had failed to present enough evidence to secure a guilty verdict. Durkin denied the motion, and Juhasz proceeded with his case and called only two witnesses.

Juhasz first called Kent’s 17-year-old daughter, Christina, who testified that she became friends with the student when she added Christina Kent on Snapchat in 2019. She said they interacted daily on the social media app until the end of May 2021, shortly before the allegations against Kent were brought to authorities.

She also said her parents use the Life360 app to monitor her and her brothers’ locations. The state introduced GPS data from that app as evidence that Kent and the student were in the same place at the dates and times of the alleged sexual acts. Christina Kent said she has found the app to be inaccurate on occasion.

Christina Kent found a photo on Kent’s phone of Kent and Carla Bobbey at a May 8 Cleveland baseball game and brought it to the attention of Kent’s wife. Christina Kent said the student was a source of support after she discovered her father’s affair with Bobbey.

The photo was the topic of conversation between Bobbey and the student when they spoke in late May 2021 at Poland Nutrition. The girl’s knowledge of the photo made Bobbey suspicious and led to another meeting, at which the student made the claims about Kent coercing her into oral sex.

After Christina Kent left the witness stand, it was her father’s turn to tell his side of the story.

Kent said he maintained multiple social media accounts that helped him in his duties as school resource officer at Poland Seminary High School, including Instagram and Snapchat, which the state alleges Kent used to carry on the affair with the student. Kent said it was the student who used the apps to check his whereabouts and carry on conversations.

Kent said the girl regularly pulled up next to his police cruiser to talk to him and signed out of classes to talk to him while he was patrolling the hallways. He said he told her to go back to class. He added he maintained contact with the student even after he felt she was crossing a line because of “empathy.”

“Her mom had passed away; my son had passed away. She was always upset, and we were kind of on the same wavelength,” he said. Kent denied the student’s claim that he asked her to reach out to Christina to help her cope with grief over Kent’s son Kyle’s death in a 2018 car crash.

Kent said he did the factory reset to protect Christina from seeing things she shouldn’t, related to his affair with Bobbey. Prosecutors maintained that he wiped the phone to protect himself from the blooming investigation into the sexual battery charges.

Throughout the trial, and again in closing arguments, state attorneys Kara Keating and Denise Salerno stressed that all of the girl’s allegations corresponded with other evidence in the case, including Kent’s own testimony.

“The only detail Steve Kent denies is the one that hurts Steve Kent,” Keating said.

Juhasz, though, continually pointed out that the student was the lone source of the sexual battery allegations against Kent, and he said the rest of the evidence was not enough to support the claims.

“It could have happened the way (she) said, but virtually everything has to fall perfectly into place, and it does not,” Juhasz said.

In his closing arguments, Juhasz criticized both local and state investigators for failing to follow up on what he said were inconsistencies in the girl’s story, and for not pursuing other evidence in the two years since the charges were filed.

Neither the prosecution nor the defense had any comments about the verdict, nor did Kent or any member of the student’s family.