Hiring of Coach Raises Questions

Officials scrambled Wednesday to determine how a convicted sex offender slipped through legally required criminal background checks and was allowed to coach children at a high school and a YMCA.

YMCA officials said Darryl McDonald, 36, of Sylmar, lied on his 1994 employment application, denying he had ever been convicted of a felony.

They said his fingerprints were sent by the YMCA to the state Department of Justice for a background check, which revealed no criminal record. Officials from the department and the YMCA each suggested that the other agency had erred in handling the fingerprints.

McDonald was hired to work with children by the YMCA and Alemany High School, a private Catholic school in Mission Hills, and allowed to volunteer at San Fernando High, despite being a registered sex offender.

Records show he was convicted of having oral sex with a minor in 1989; his lawyer said the conviction was the result of McDonald’s dating teenage girls when he was in his early 20s and being turned in by an upset parent. McDonald also was convicted in 1995 for assaulting his then-girlfriend, whom he has since married.

McDonald, a popular coach who took the Alemany basketball team from last place to first in one season, was suspended Tuesday by the North Valley YMCA and the school.

Justice Department spokesman Michael Van Winkle said it is virtually impossible that agency employees would misidentify a fingerprint.

The department first checks an applicant’s personal information, such as name, date of birth and Social Security number, against its criminal database, he said.

YMCA officials said McDonald provided them a birth date that differed slightly from that on his criminal record and driver’s license, but Van Winkle said that shouldn’t have been enough to skirt the system.

Department staffers always check the coded numbers given to the whorls and loops of a fingerprint against all those in their database, Van Winkle said, to prevent clearing someone who provides false information. Possible matches are then compared visually.

McDonald’s correct criminal record appears in the department’s database along with his correct fingerprints, the spokesman added. He said the department cleared the fingerprints submitted by the YMCA as McDonald’s, but suggested the prints might have belonged to someone else.

“There is no way that in 1994 we would have cleared the fingerprints of the individual who has been convicted,” Van Winkle said. “There is no way that we could have cleared those fingerprints.”

He said the department is still investigating to determine where the error occurred.

Larry Rosen, president and chief executive of the YMCA of Metropolitan Los Angeles, said the prints sent to the state in fact belonged to McDonald.

He said the signature on the print card matches the one on McDonald’s job application, and that he would have been required to show a government-issued photo identification card when he was fingerprinted.

The Department of Justice probably made a mistake, Rosen said.

“It’s something we ought to be concerned about,” Rosen said. “Your fingerprints are your fingerprints and you still have the question of why the fingerprints didn’t match up as they should.”

The organization has complied with the Department of Justice’s request that it return the 1994 print card and ask McDonald to be fingerprinted again.

Attorney Jeffrey Brodey said McDonald would not agree to be fingerprinted again, and that his client would not comment on whether he purposely hid his past from his employers.

At Alemany High, a source speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the school probably neglected to check into whether McDonald had a criminal record.

Alemany administrators were attempting Wednesday to determine how McDonald was hired in 1998, said the Rev. Gregory Coiro, spokesman for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

“The athletic director is saying the fingerprints were submitted for a background check. Yet, there’s no record of the school being told that this person does not have a criminal record,” Coiro said.

Such a lapse would be a violation of state law, which since 1997 has required all schools to run criminal background checks for all employees through fingerprint records in the Department of Justice, officials said.

Schools are also prohibited from hiring those convicted of sex, drug and violent crimes, according to the department.

Schools are not required to conduct background checks on volunteers, said Shel Erlich, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Unified School District, adding that the district does so only in rare cases. Volunteers are not asked to fill out employment applications, he added.

So when McDonald was accepted at San Fernando High as a volunteer assistant boys’ basketball coach in 1991, he was not asked whether he was a convicted felon and no one checked his criminal record, Erlich said.

“I’m assuming if they try to do background checks on everyone who wanted to volunteer, it would be a very expensive and cumbersome process,” Erlich said. “It’s not required, so we don’t put people through it.”