Popular youth sports coach convicted of molesting student

A former co-owner of STARS Prep Academy was convicted Tuesday of sexually assaulting a student and an employee.

Christopher Martin Flores was convicted of four counts of lewd acts on a child 14 or 15, two counts of sexual penetration by foreign object of a victim younger than 16 and a count of sexual penetration by foreign object, all felonies.

Flores, who was taken into custody after the verdicts, was scheduled to be sentenced Oct. 4.

Flores was co-owner, trainer and coach at the STARS Sports Academy, which was a developmental league for youths. It had moved from Anaheim to the campus of Calvary Chapel High School in Santa Ana when a former soccer player at the school said she was first attacked in January 2021 when she was 14.

The now 17-year-old accuser, who lives in Irvine and will begin her senior year in high school this year, testified that she was in eighth grade when she first met “Coach Frogg,” as he was known.

The accuser’s stepfather knew of the school, which provided online classes and coaching, so he suggested it to the teen’s mother, she said. When she attended classes while the academy was in Anaheim she said she did not know the defendant, but then her mother reached out to Flores to mentor her, she said.

“Did your relationship change then?” Deputy District Attorney Sarah Rahman asked her.

“Yes,” she said.

“Did it turn sexual?” Rahman asked.

“Yes,” she replied as she began to cry, taking a tissue to dab the tears.

The teen’s mother wanted Flores to encourage her to be more grateful and adjust her attitude, she said.

“He said, `I had to fix my attitude,”’ she said. “He told me to look at him like a father figure.”

Then Flores told her to “give him a hug, and he grabbed my butt and said this is our little secret,” she testified.

Flores added, “That my butt was getting big,” the accuser testified.

“I thought it was weird,” she said. “I just thought that it was weird.”

In April 2021, the teen’s mother could not pick her up right away after school so she went with Flores to an athletic center in Anaheim used for practice with several boys from the school, she said.

When the boys got out to go to practice, Flores told the girl to remain in the car because, “We’re going to get smoothies,” she said.

Flores drove to a smoothie shop, got the drinks and returned to the car with the teen waiting for him. He drove back to the gym and parked the car on the street, she said.

It was near dusk and she was drinking her smoothie when “he puts his hand down my pants” and started fondling her, the teen said.

The teen said she felt “numb” and was not reacting, prompting Flores to say, “act like (you) like it ... or show that (you) like it.”

The teen testified, “I told him I don’t know how to react.”

Flores “told me not to tell anyone, it’s our little secret,” she testified.

The teen went into the bathroom at the gym “right away and checked because it felt weird,” she said. “That never happened to me before so it was strange.”

“Did it hurt?” the prosecutor asked.

“Yes,” she said.

She also recounted an afternoon when she was summoned to Flores’ office in what was known as the K-Wave Building across the street. Flores had picked up lunch as he frequently did from McDonald’s for the athletes and when the girl arrived in his office he had her start eating, she said.

Then, the accuser testified, Flores asked her to stand up and “He picked me up like I was a baby, my legs straddling him,” and then, “He had me up against the wall and he was kissing me.”

Flores groped her breasts and tongue kissed her, she said.

As she was leaving to bring the lunch to her classmates, he asked her what kind of underwear she had on, so the soccer player pulled down her shorts a tad to show him, she said.

She also accused him of picking her up once during winter break in December 2021 when she had left the academy and was a freshman in high school and drove down an alley where he parked the car and began kissing her, she said.

Also, after she had graduated from the academy and was in high school, he called her trying to get her to go on a date with him, she testified. She recorded the two-minute call, which was played for jurors.

“He was trying to get me to hang out with him ... it was weird,” she said.

She also accused Flores of asking her if she “deleted everything,” referring to text messages between the two.

The accuser said she told her boyfriend when she was a freshman in high school as well as two other friends. She said she asked them not to tell anyone because she did not want Flores to get into trouble because she wanted to have a future playing soccer and Flores had “a lot of connections.”

During the summer of 2022 when she was preparing to enter her sophomore year of high school, the police came calling with questions, she said. When her mother asked her if Flores had touched her she initially denied it but then started crying and then came clean, she said.

“I just told her he did touch me and she called police,” she said.

The reason she didn’t come forward sooner, she added, was, “I just didn’t know how to tell anybody.”

When the news broke of Flores’ arrest, his former business partner, ex- NFL cornerback Jason David, posted a video on social media saying the academy had cut ties with the defendant and that he was “disgusted” by the allegations.

Flores was also accused of hugging another girl at the school from behind and asking her sexually charged questions, and asking inappropriate questions of one of her friends, another student. Flores was not charged with that conduct but the evidence was used to show a pattern of behavior for jurors to consider.

Flores was also convicted of sexually assaulting a 22-year-old woman who worked at the school during a party at Flores’ home in Bellflower in January 2021.

The defendant’s attorney, Ed Welbourn, said his client was not guilty of any of the accusations. Many parents at the school looked to Flores to mentor their children, Welbourn said.

Welbourn said the students were not allowed in the K-Wave building, casting doubt on the accuser’s story of a groping in his office.

Welbourn also cast doubt on the timing alleged in the charges. The defense attorney said his client drove the students, including his son, to the athletic center in Anaheim in April, not earlier as was alleged.

But the 17-year-old victim said she found a Snapchat photo on her phone that was time-stamped for April, prompting a private meeting with the judge because that evidence had not been turned over to the defense prior to the trial. Orange County Superior Court Judge Robert Knox later in the trial denied a motion for a mistrial.

Welbourn said the accuser was in a “different county and city” when she said the sex assaults occurred.

During the trial the defense presented evidence that the defendant went on a recruiting trip to Alabama the day the victim said she took the selfie with Flores’ son on the way to a practice.

Welbourn said the newly hired 22-year-old who was at the defendant’s party had been excessively drinking and was dancing “provocatively” at the gathering when she said she felt someone grope her behind and thought it was the defendant.

When the party got too loud, they all went inside and while sitting and eating at a kitchen table with benches she said he sexually assaulted her under the table, Welbourn said. But no one else at the party saw any indication of something like that happening and that jurors must “consider her level of intoxication” at the time, Welbourn said.

“This case is going to boil down to three teenage girls who started a story and built on it,” Welbourn said.

He also pointed to a text message in which one of the accusers said she wanted to “clear” Flores’ name.

Flores was acquitted of rape, kidnapping and sodomy in Pasadena in 2009, but jurors did not hear that evidence in this trial.