Former Broward County prosecutor Maria Schneider acknowledged that while it can be difficult to charge someone with sexual assault, the police should have done more. When told that the former chief did not make a record of the conversation with the mother reporting the rape of her 17-year-old, Schneider said “shame on them for not better documenting this.”

Keith Taylor, a former NYPD detective who is now an adjunct assistant professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at City University of New York, agreed that police should have taken more steps to investigate Olea.

“There [had] to be a substantial investigation of these allegations, even if the victims are uncooperative, because of the severe danger of this individual continuing to do what they do, which is just being in a position to prey on children,” Taylor said.

Almost a secret

Though he kept the public in the dark about the rape allegation, Chief Press told at least one person about it back in 2012: Todd Hofferberth. He was, and continues to be, the director of parks and recreation in Key Biscayne, making $211,134 a year. Hofferberth knew something else objectively disturbing about Coach Olea: that he had been fired by the village’s community center in November 2011 for parading around with a student draped around his midsection in a sexually suggestive way.

At the community center, Olea had been working for American Gymsters, which was the contracted gymnastics vendor for the village. The company also ran a private gym in a strip mall on Crandon Boulevard.

Hofferberth had the authority to issue permits for coaches to teach classes at the Village Green, a municipal park across the street — or deny them.

Neither the briefing from Chief Press nor his personal knowledge of Olea’s past firing dissuaded Hofferberth from approving a permit for Olea in 2013 — and reissuing it in 2014, in effect giving Olea the village’s stamp of approval.

When questioned about those permits — before Olea’s arrest — Hofferberth said to a Herald reporter that he remembered the conversation with Press but that, at the time, nothing came up in a background check and the allegations were “hearsay.”

After Olea was arrested and charged, the parks and recreation director stopped answering reporters’ calls. Steve Williamson, the village manager of Key Biscayne, spoke on his behalf.

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