A longtime Gwinnett County volunteer wrestling coach has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for molesting a girl at least 200 times over a five-year span.
Francis Castaneda, 46, lived with the victim between 2006 and 2011, the Gwinnett County District Attorney’s Office said Friday.
Castaneda had been a volunteer coach at several Gwinnett middle schools, the district previously confirmed.
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Gwinnett schools spokeswoman Sloan Roach described Castaneda as a “community coach who helped with the youth middle school wrestling program” in Lawrenceville’s Archer High School cluster. She said the district ran a background check when Castaneda went through Gwinnett’s community coach training program but stressed he was a volunteer, not an employee.
Though the two lived together, it’s unclear what the relationship between Castaneda and his victim was. Prosecutors said he coached the young woman in middle and high school, but police said that isn’t how they met.
The victim, who was 12 years old when the abuse began, reported Castaneda to police in May 2015 when she was 20.
She testified at his four-day trial that he would fondle her in her bed as she pretended to sleep. She said she was molested more than 200 times over the five years they lived together.
She also testified that the abuse got progressively worse as she got older, and that Castaneda once beat her, dragged her upstairs by her hair and forced her to strip naked after he caught her texting a boy.
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The abuse lasted until the teen moved into her mother’s house at 16 years old, prosecutors said. She came forward in 2015 after disclosing the years of abuse to her counselor during her freshman year of college.
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A Gwinnett jury deliberated for 45 minutes before returning a guilty verdict on two counts of child molestation. Castaneda was sentenced to 40 years, with 15 to serve behind bars.
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