Cole Corey claims he was innocent on rape charge

By MICKEY ALVARADO

Most are willing, when caught, to go the distance required to correct a wrong but in the courts of Michigan it can be hard to accept the justice offered when it differs so greatly from one person to another. Here, in the courts of Lenawee County, the aspirations of a young Michigan State University football player from Tecumseh, Cole Corey, were discarded by the criminal justice system when it sent him to prison at the age of 21 for something he did when he was 17. He admits to drinking, taking ecstasy and having sex with a girl. The ‘system’ said he and another athlete raped a young female. He asked the Herald to tell his story.

“I’ve paid, I think, for all the things I’ve done by now,” said Corey. “Have I paid for the drugs I took that night? I didn’t give them to anybody. I didn’t sexually assault anybody. Two and a half years for some ecstasy I took. I’d say that’s more than enough.”
In his youth of yesterday, Corey lived dangerously and looked for fun in the ways of sex, alcohol and drugs, not necessarily in that order. It was 2002 when he and another gifted Tecumseh High School athlete, Anthony Sandoval, invited a female friend over to the Sandoval’s home for drinks and the drug ecstasy. According to testimony, the two boys swallowed a quarter pill each and Sandoval later gave the girl the other half of the intimacy-enhancing drug. After a couple of drinks the trio took a dip in the hot tub and all three 17-year-olds became overheated and excited. They got out of the tub, watched some porn and continued to party. The three kids had sex, they’ve all admitted to that, but the girl went home in the early morning hours and told her mother she’d been taken advantage of and raped. The boys denied any wrong doing, claiming the sex was consensual.

Tecumseh’s police department investigated the incident but the prosecuting attorney didn’t bring up felony charges at that time. The girl involved changed her mind and decided not to press charges. However, three years later, in 2005, when Corey became a rising star on Michigan State University’s football team he was told he was going to have to pay for that wrong. The charges were brought back up when a Tecumseh High School track coach, Matt Peterson, was being investigated for allowing athletes privileges at his home where alcohol-fueled sex parties were supposedly taking place. A bar was available to the young athletes as well as a hot tub. At one of the Peterson parties a second girl was involved in sexual activity with two athletes, one of them again being Sandoval. She, too, said she was taken advantage of and raped. The girl who had first accused Corey and Sandoval of rape heard about the second hot tub incident and decided to pursue her original accusations. The police also wanted Corey to provide information to help prosecute Peterson and Sandoval and the county prosecutor’s office charged him with 13 felony counts, five of which carried the possibility of a life sentence in prison.
“Those parties at Peterson’s house took place in the summer of 03,” said Corey. “I was never accused of a crime at a Peterson party.”

Corey went off to college in the fall and was, in his own words “out of control” during his freshman year.  He was red-shirted so instead of playing, he and the other freshman on the Spartan team would go out all weekend drinking.  “I’d get drunk and I’d get into trouble. That’s what I did.” Corey said.

He and the other boys wound up at a frat party in one outing and Corey broke a guy’s jaw in a fistfight. Just a couple of weeks later, he was involved in a bigger brawl where a friend smashed a kid in the head with a rock and knocked him unconscious. When Corey was questioned about the second incident he lied to the police to cover for his Tecumseh friend. It was eventually determined that the person who threw the rock did so in self-defense but Corey was forced to pay for his lie. He was given a break in the form of the Holmes Youthful Training Act and received two years probation for filing a false police report in the investigation. With the deal he got to remain on the MSU football team.
“I never got in trouble after that,” said Corey. “Because it was an eye opener. How hard did I work to get where I was? And here I was jerking it off.”

School was going well for Corey after that and he was looking to see more time on the playing field with the Spartans. Police, however, began investigating coach Peterson and his parties and everything was about to come crashing in.

“A lot of the rumors were true and a lot of it was false,” said Corey. “Kids were drinking, yeah. Peterson having sex with girls? Not that I know of and I think I would know.”
It was a couple of years after the big track party and three years after the initial hot tub incident when the police again contacted Corey and wanted more information.  After his previous encounters with the police and disliking their questioning tactics, Corey was uncooperative and had nothing to tell them. The prosecuting attorney reopened the investigation on the initial hot tub instance where Corey was accused of rape, and in the fall of 2005, a week before the big MSU vs. U-of-M football game, he was charged with 13 felonies.

“It was a squeeze tactic to get information out of me on Peterson from the ’03 parties,” said Corey. “This is how it happened. Then it comes out in the newspaper and it all meshes together and looks like it’s one and the same.”

Corey again questioned the timing. “They could have charged me for it back then but they didn’t. Years later they wanted to because they wanted to get information out of me they thought I had.”

When Detroit’s largest newspaper got a hold of the story they referred to the group of young athletes involved as the “Face Men.” Corey said that Peterson made a joke once, referring to himself and the boys as “Face Men.” Peterson never believed himself to be a good-looking guy so, “It was meant to be ironic,” said Corey. “This was a joke that was rarely mentioned. When I first read that in the newspaper I couldn’t believe it. The only reason it was ever brought up was because it was tabloid bull… garbage to make it some great story.”

Corey insisted there were no ranks between the athletes as was suggested in the papers. He was not a lieutenant. There was no such thing as a “Face Men” gang. It was just a tasteless and immature joke. He said Peterson never provided him with any girls for sex. He had a girlfriend at the time and didn’t need a grown up coach to help him get anything but alcohol.

The police believed Peterson was involved in much more than they could prove and needed kids to inform on all of his alleged illegal activities. When they began pressuring the kids to talk they found that the coach was also possibly connected to fake Rolex watches being sold on Ebay. But, most of the charges couldn’t be sought successfully and the investigation went on until felony charges were brought up on Sandoval and Corey. The most severe of the felonies were wiped off the slate when the kids pled to lesser charges.

Ultimately, Corey pled guilty to possession of Methamphetamine/Ecstasy (CS-D) thinking he would be put on probation. Instead, he was given a 2- to 10-year prison term on May 18, 2006. The guidelines for the crime called for no more than a year in jail and probation but because of the sexual allegations judge Harvey Koselka exceeded the guidelines.

Corey did his time and was paroled from prison on November 25, 2008.
The entire time he was incarcerated he denied raping his accuser. He refused to admit that it was anything more than consensual sex despite judge Koselka ordering him to join an impulse control treatment program before his release. A Michigan Department of Corrections psychologist, James F. Dickson, didn’t agree with the court order, and in a report assessing Corey’s need for the sex offender program said, “Mr. Corey has never denied that he had sex with the victim when they were both minors. It is this clinician’s determination that Mr. Corey is guilty of extremely poor judgment, but not sexual assault. Mr. Corey will not be placed into sex offender treatment.”

When he first faced the parole board in December of 2007 it went about as well as he expected. He wouldn’t admit to the rape allegations and was denied release. The flop meant he wouldn’t see the parole board for approximately 18 months.

“There comes a certain point where I have to ask myself how far am I going to lean to get out,” said Corey. “At what point am I going to say, ‘I have to put my foot down and stay true to this?”’

Then out of the blue, Corey got a break when his case was reviewed by the board and he was called back much earlier than expected. When he returned with the exact same convictions less than a year later his parole was authorized.

Three months after getting out, in February of 2009, Corey hired a polygraph specialist, Howard Swabash, to administer a test concerning the rape allegations. In the opinion of the expert examiner, Corey was completely truthful in the answers he gave regarding his innocence. The questions specifically asked if the accuser freely consented to have sexual intercourse and another asked if Corey forced her in any way.

“I would never even consider drugging a girl or getting her drunk to the point where she was incapacitated for sex, absolutely not,” he said. “Never. I’ve never had trouble getting females. Why would I do that?”

In the official court manuscripts prosecuting attorney Poer’s final question to Corey’s accuser was, “But for that combination, the alcohol, the heat of the hot tub and the ecstasy, would you have engaged in those sexual acts with the defendant and Anthony Sandoval?” Her reply was “No.”

Corey said he agreed with the police to take a polygraph test early in the investigation but one was never given.

Six students were prosecuted for felonies related to the two-year long investigation of the Peterson parties, but Corey and Sandoval were the only students convicted of felony counts and sent to prison.

Corey is getting on with his life as a convicted felon. He has a job and is again a productive member of society. Football is no longer a big part of his life and he doesn’t anticipate getting picked up by a team any time soon. “This old body has taken enough of a beating for one lifetime,” he said.

Sandoval is still incarcerated for his reduced charges on one felony count of assault with a deadly weapon (ecstasy) and a concurrent one-year sentence for assault with a dangerous weapon. He was initially charged with seven felony counts including first-degree criminal sexual conduct, which carries a possible life sentence.

The other person in the second hot tub incident with Sandoval was Jack DaSilva. He pled guilty to a reduced charge of aggravated assault and was sentenced to 25 days in jail and 120 hours of community service. He was also put on probation for 18 months and ordered to pay fines.

Coach Peterson faced 20 felony counts including distributing obscene matter to children, criminal sexual conduct and accosting children for immoral purposes. He was accused of having sex with a 17-year-old girl in 2003 and the first-degree criminal sexual conduct charge carried a possible life in prison term. The 33-year-old also faced 10 misdemeanor counts of furnishing alcohol to minors and an additional count of allowing the consumption of drugs and alcohol on the premises. He was sentenced to four years and eight months to seven years in prison for distributing child sexually abusive activity. He also received a concurrent 17-month to four-year term for possession of child sexually abusive material. The charges involved Peterson letting kids watch a homemade pornographic video of minors in his home. The boy, Matthew Dunn, who made the sex tape with his girlfriend was sentenced to two weeks hard labor with 160 hours of community service and two years probation with fines for a reduced aggravated assault.