PITTSFIELD, Mass. — A former Olympian has been indicted on 12 counts of indecent assault and battery alleged to have occurred in Becket and dating back 50 years.
Conrad Mainwaring, 69, was arrested by Los Angeles authorities on Wednesday on a fugitive from justice warrant related to allegations he had assaulted children while a camp counselor in Becket in the 1970s.
The Berkshire District Attorney's Office had obtained the indictments last month and is seeking his extradition.
According to ESPN, Mainwaring was arrested after pleading no contest in the Los Angeles County Courthouse on a similar allegation.
He is facing nine counts of indecent assault and battery on a child over the age of 14 and three counts of indecent assault and battery on a child under the age of 14. The court will schedule his arraignment following the extradition process.
The charges are the result of a multi-year investigation by state police into several allegations of indecent assault and battery Mainwaring allegedly committed as a counselor at Greylock Camp, a sports camp for boys, in the 1970s. The victims were reportedly seven boys molested over several years.
"We are grateful to the victims for having the courage to tell their stories. I also thank the state police detectives who developed and brought this case to this point and the grand jury for their careful consideration of the facts," District Attorney Andrea Harrington said. "My office is dedicated to holding perpetrators of these crimes accountable to help the victims heal."
The state police detective unit assigned to the district attorney's office began investigating the allegations following a report published by ESPN about Mainwaring. Since then, multiple victims shared similar stories of Mainwaring allegedly using his position of power to coerce teenage boys into sexual conduct.
Mainwaring represented Antigua as a runner in the 1976 Montreal Summer Olympics and later was a coach. After working at Camp Greylock he spent five years at Syracuse University, then Colgate University and California Institute of Technology, where he was let go after a student complaint, according to ESPN.
He has been living in California since but a three-year investigation by ESPN "found more than 50 men who said they were abused as boys or young men by Mainwaring beginning in the early 1970s and up through 2016." The Massachusetts allegations surfaced during this investigation.
