Former Windsor Coach, Trainer Acquitted Of Assault Charge

By Sharon Dunn
[email protected]

February 27, 2012

A former Windsor coach and trainer was exonerated last week when a Weld District Court jury acquitted him of a felony assault he was charged with after a tangle with a fellow personal trainer in 2010.

Ty Nordic, 44, was arrested in May 2010, after he and another personal trainer at the Anytime Fitness in Windsor fought after a disagreement inside the gym.

“It’s been terrifying the last two years, wondering if you’re going to be ripped from your family, your friends, job and church,” Nordic said this week from his new home in Oklahoma. He now is the head strength coach at Bartlesville High School and the personal trainer for the Conoco Phillips Fitness Center in Bartlesville, Okla.

According to a Windsor police affidavit, trainer Kevin Hinkle told them that Nordic assaulted him on May 5 after he confronted his fellow trainer about instructing his client on an improper use of the equipment at Anytime Fitness, 1159 Main St. in Windsor. Trainers rent the facilities for training clients, and are not employed by Anytime, Nordic said.

Nordic said a surveillance video would have shown Hinkle confronting him in the gym, but that video was destroyed.

After a four-day trial last week, a jury took roughly an hour to acquit Nordic of the charge.

“We appreciate the jury’s considered service and feel that the verdict was just and appropriate, and it comes as a big relief for Ty Nordic and his family,” said defense attorney Derek Samuelson of Fort Collins. Had Nordic been convicted, he was facing from five to 16 years in prison.

Nordic said he was grateful for the time the jury took to see the case for what it was, an act of self-defense.

He said the two argued inside the gym, and Hinkle was using such profanity that it embarrassed him. Nordic said he asked to take the matter outside. He said when he turned around, Hinkle was coming after him, so he hit him.

“I got a little nervous, I got out the door and turned around and this 230-pound man is coming after me,” Nordic said. “It was either defend myself or get clobbered. I hit him and he went down. I thought it was over.”

Hinkle got up, and Nordic said he hit him two more times, he said.

Nordic said he spent roughly $30,000 defending himself in the case that he said should have never been charged. He said no one in the police department or the district attorney’s office wanted to hear his side of the story.

“I’m very, very disappointed” in the system, he said. “I just know now that there are probably tens of thousands of people in the country that are in prison that shouldn’t be there. If I couldn’t have afforded to hire a good attorney, I could have been one of them.”