Staff photo / R. Michael Semple... Former Poland schools resource officer and Austintown Township trustee Steve Kent stands as the jury leaves the courtroom during a break in his trial Thursday. Kent is charged with three counts of sexual battery involving a former student at Poland Seminary High School. That former student testified for more than three hours Wednesday. Testimony is set to resume at 8:45 a.m. today.

YOUNGSTOWN — An alleged illicit relationship Austintown Trustee Steve Kent had with a 17-year-old Poland Seminary High School student began innocently enough in 2020, according to testimony Thursday in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court. Kent is accused of three counts of sexual battery.

The student, now 20 and in college, told jurors in Judge John Durkin’s courtroom that the relationship began when she offered her sympathy for the death of Kent’s son while Kent was the student resource police officer at Poland. She told him her mother had died of breast cancer when she was 7, and she said Kent wanted her to talk to his daughter, who was struggling with her brother’s death. The student said she often would sign out of classes to talk to Kent while he was performing his duties as school resource officer.

“I thought of him as just an adult figure in my life, someone I could trust,” the student testified. She said she never had any romantic interest in Kent.

As they began to talk more, though, she said Kent began making comments about her body and even touched her in ways she felt were inappropriate.

Nonetheless, an extracurricular friendship began on social media when the student contacted Kent through Instagram to ask him for help with a traffic ticket.

After that, she said, Kent started sending her regular messages through Instagram, eventually including pictures of himself with and without clothing, some showing full nudity. She said she eventually felt pressure to reciprocate.

The student said things became even more uncomfortable when the COVID-19 pandemic pushed students out of the classrooms and into online learning in March 2020. She testified that she met with Kent more than 50 times over the life of the affair, often while he was on duty as a Poland Township police officer. She said he would tell her his schedule and let her know where he was patrolling, implying that she should meet him.

He regularly would touch her in ways that made her uncomfortable, she said, but things escalated on “Black Friday” in 2020 when she bumped into Kent while shopping in Boardman. On that occasion, she told jurors, she got into his truck, and he kissed and fondled her.

She continued to meet with Kent, but after a few similar incidents, she said she had a conversation with him in March 2021 on speakerphone at a friend’s house, with the friend’s parent listening. She told Kent they could not continue to meet. She said all contact ceased for about three weeks, until she and Kent bumped into each other again at a Poland grocery store, after which their meetings resumed.

She said the first sexual act occurred in late April 2021 in the parking lot of Creekside Fitness in Boardman. The girl said Kent let her see a firearm he had in his truck, then compelled her to perform the act. She said she was afraid of the weapon and thought she had no choice.

Two other incidents occurred in May 2021 in parking lot areas at the Southern Park Mall in Boardman.

Asked by defense attorney John Juhasz why she continued to meet with Kent, the woman said she didn’t believe she could escape the relationship.

“I felt like everything I was doing was in his hands,” she said.

After the student’s testimony, Ohio Attorney General Prosecutor Kara Keating called Carla Bobbey, a parent of former Poland students who has known the woman and her family for many years. Bobbey eventually brought the allegations to school Principal Kevin Schneider and, ultimately, to the Poland Township Police Department and Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation.

Bobbey said she had a conversation with the student when they met by chance at Poland Nutrition in late May 2021. The girl said some things that day that made Bobbey suspicious of Kent’s intentions with the girl. Bobbey bumped into Kent by chance the following day, she said.

“I told him to leave her alone or ‘I’ll tell her dad and your wife,’ and he just kinda blew it off,” Bobbey said.

She testified that she texted the student a few days later and they met again to talk further. It was at that meeting, on June 5, 2021, that the girl told Bobbey about the relationship with Kent and the alleged sexual acts.

Bobbey said she confronted Kent, whom she knew personally, that night via Facetime, and told him what she’d learned. At that point, she said, he sighed, apologized for hurting the community, and said he’d quit his job and leave town.

“I told him, ‘No, that’s not how this is going to go. Turn in your badge. I don’t want you around our children.'”

The next day, June 6, Bobbey met with the Poland principal. The student had testified that was the same day she opened up to her dad.

“I had wanted to tell someone, but I was scared,” the student testified. “(Carla Bobbey) gave me the courage to find my voice and get it over with.”

In addition to the three counts of sexual battery, Kent also is charged with attempting to destroy evidence. Authorities said he attempted to eliminate any record of contact with the girl from his phone. The student said Kent also instructed her routinely to delete conversations they had on Snapchat. She said she took screenshots of the conversations before deleting them. Some of those were introduced as evidence Thursday.

The state’s last witness for the day also spoke to that allegation. Erica Moore, a BCI agent who works in computer forensics, told the court that she used specialized software to pull data from both Kent’s and the student’s phones. When she pulled data from Kent’s phone, she found an “.obliterated” file, which indicates that the user performed a factory reset on the device. All that is left behind is a record of when that reset occurred. The data showed Kent’s phone was factory reset at 12:54 p.m. June 6, 2021.

Also testifying Thursday was Courtney Wilson, a social worker at Akron Children’s Hospital Mahoning Valley Campus Child Advocacy Center, who said she interviewed the student when she was 17, just days after the last incident of alleged sexual abuse. Wilson said the girl described three occasions between April and June 2021 when Kent allegedly forced her to perform sex acts and other incidents of unwelcome contact.

Testimony is scheduled to continue today.