A Clermont County grand jury has indicted the police chief of Bethel, Ohio, on 56 counts of sexual battery and 14 counts of unlawful sexual conduct with a minor, 70 third-degree felony charges in all, stemming from alleged crimes committed while he served as a Young Marines instructor and schoolteacher between 2005 and 2010.
Chad Essert, 44, was taken into custody in Seminole, Florida, and is being held in the Pinellas County Jail pending extradition to Clermont County, Fox News reported. If convicted on every count, Essert faces a maximum of 280 years in prison.
Why a sitting Ohio police chief was in Florida at the time of his arrest remains unclear. So does his current employment status with the village of Bethel, a community of roughly 2,700 people about 40 miles southeast of Cincinnati.
Investigators said the alleged offenses took place across Clermont and Hamilton counties during a five-year window when Essert held multiple positions of trust over young people. He was an instructor with the Young Marines, a national nonprofit youth education and service program for boys and girls ages eight through high school graduation, and a teacher at Scarlet Oaks Career Campus, as the New York Post identified the school.
Throughout that same period, the Ohio Attorney General's Office database shows Essert also worked in law enforcement, with the Elmwood Place Police Department, the Maineville Police Department, and the Lincoln Heights Police Department.
That detail matters. A man who allegedly preyed on a child simultaneously wore a badge and carried the authority of the state. The people who entrusted their children to his care, as a teacher, as a youth-program leader, had every reason to believe a sworn officer would protect those kids, not harm them.
The indictment is not the first time Essert's conduct drew official scrutiny. Fox 19 reported that Essert resigned from a law-enforcement position in Elmwood Place, Ohio, in 2010, the final year of the alleged abuse, to avoid being fired over allegations of sexual harassment and intimidating a witness.
He was not prosecuted at that time. Instead, he moved on. He eventually rose to become the top law-enforcement officer in Bethel.
That trajectory raises hard questions about the systems that are supposed to screen officers as they move between departments. Ohio maintains an Attorney General's database tracking law-enforcement employment history. Essert's record was in it. The sexual-harassment allegations in Elmwood Place were apparently known. Yet he kept getting hired, kept getting promoted, and kept accumulating authority over others.
In early May, Essert was placed on paid leave under Ohio's Family and Medical Leave Act after being investigated for possible misconduct. Authorities have said the new 70-count indictment is unrelated to that earlier probe. No further details about the May investigation have been disclosed.
Clermont County Sheriff Chris Stratton issued a statement after the grand jury returned its indictment. As Breitbart reported, Stratton acknowledged the weight of the case:
"It takes tremendous courage for a victim to come forward, especially when the accused wears a badge and holds a position of authority."
Stratton continued:
"Today's indictment demonstrates that no one is above the law. Every victim deserves to be heard, and every allegation will be thoroughly investigated and pursued in accordance with the law."
Those words carry particular force here. The accused is not a random suspect. He is, or was, the chief of police. The person a small community looks to for safety. The person who, by the nature of his office, wields enormous discretion over who gets investigated and who does not.
Several significant questions remain open as Essert awaits extradition or the decision to waive it and return to Ohio voluntarily.
No arraignment date in Clermont County has been announced. The indictment's case number and the specific Ohio statutes cited have not been made public in available reporting. Whether the alleged victim or victims were boys or girls has not been disclosed, nor has the precise age of the person prosecutors described as a student of Essert.
It is also unknown whether the Young Marines organization itself was aware of any complaints during the years Essert served as an instructor. The program describes itself as serving children as young as eight. Parents who enrolled their kids in that program deserve answers about what safeguards were, or were not, in place.
And then there is the most uncomfortable question of all: How did a man who resigned under a cloud of sexual-harassment allegations in 2010 end up running a police department? Who signed off on that hire? What background check was performed, and what did it find?
Cases like this expose a recurring failure in how law-enforcement agencies handle problem officers. An officer gets caught in misconduct. He resigns before he can be fired. The resignation lets him avoid a formal termination that might flag his record. He moves to another department, often a smaller one, with fewer resources for vetting, and starts over. Sometimes he rises.
Ohio is not the only state with this problem. But Ohio has a database specifically designed to track officer employment histories. The information was there. Whether anyone checked it, or checked it and hired Essert anyway, is a question the village of Bethel and every department that employed him will eventually have to answer.
Seventy felony counts. A five-year window of alleged abuse. A victim, or victims, who were children. And the man accused of it all held a position designed to protect the public.
Sheriff Stratton is right about one thing: it takes courage for a victim to come forward against someone who wears a badge. The least the system can do is make sure it never handed that badge to the wrong person in the first place.
