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.
TN, 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,” TN 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 KH told them that TN 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, TN said.
TN said a surveillance video would have shown KH 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 TN 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 TN and his family,” said defense attorney Derek Samuelson of Fort Collins. Had TN been convicted, he was facing from 5 to 16 years in prison.
TN 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 KH was using such profanity that it embarrassed him. TN said he asked to take the matter outside. He said when he turned around, KH 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,” TN said. “It was either defend myself or get clobbered. I hit him and he went down. I thought it was over.”
KH got up, and TN said he hit him two more times, he said.
TN 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.