‘A lot of people knew’
Man’s lawsuit alleges State Police, prosecutors covered up trooper’s child sexual abuse for decades
BALLSTON SPA — David Gregson was around 12 years old in the late 1970s when a state trooper pulled his marked cruiser up to him as he walked along a street in the village of Ballston Spa.
The trooper, Roger L. Coon Jr., identified himself as a truant officer and asked the boy why he wasn’t in school, Gregson recalled. He said the trooper ordered him to climb into the front seat of his car. But instead of taking Gregson to school, Coon drove to his own nearby residence.
According to Gregson, now a 57year-old flooring installer, that encounter marked the beginning of what would be roughly four years of sexual abuse he endured at the hands of the longtime trooper.
“He would track me down, find out where I was through friends, look for me, pick me up in a police car,” Gregson said last week, as he sat on a bed in a Ballston Lake motel room. “I’ve even been to the (State Police) barracks in the car, hiding in the back.”
Gregson said that Coon — who died in 2003 at age 73 — molested him at his house, at a camp he furnished behind his property, and “dozens” of times in his troop car during a period stretching from around 1977 to 1981.
Decades later, Gregson is suing the state of New York in the Court of Claims under the 2019 Child Victims Act, which temporarily lifted the statute of limitations for alleged victims of child sexual abuse. Although Coon was accused of sexually abusing numerous boys over a period of decades, and convicted twice of sexual abuse after he left the State Police, the state is fighting Gregson’s lawsuit. The civil trial is scheduled to begin next week in Albany.
Gregson alleges that the State Police were negligent in employing a trooper who used his position to molest children. His lawsuit also says the agency enabled the trooper to abuse many more victims due to their decision in the early 1980s to brush
off a series of credible accusations against Coon and to allow him to retire without facing arrest — a decision that also involved the Saratoga County district attorney’s office.
Indeed, Gregson says that he wasn’t the only one — and that he knew of multiple other boys who were sexually abused by Coon while he was a trooper.
“A lot of people knew what was going on,” Gregson said. “And just nobody ever did nothing about it.”
‘Embarrassment to the division’
According to documents shared with the Times Union, Coon was employed by the State Police from 1961 until his retirement in 1982, only a month after records show that the agency learned of credible child sex abuse allegations against him.
Coon, who had been in the Army before becoming a trooper, faced multiple criminal child sexual abuse charges in the following decades, first in 1984 and again in 1999, four years before his death.
Gregson and his attorney contend the State Police should have known about — and had the opportunity to stop — Coon’s abuse while he was still a trooper. They assert the agency’s failure to properly supervise him apparently enabled him to embed himself in the lives of multiple young boys in the Ballston Spa area, and groom them for abuse.
“He’s long dead. … We can’t hold him responsible,” said Brett Zekowski, Gregson’s attorney. “But we can hold New York state troopers responsible because they knew, or they should have known, that they had one of the most prolific pedophiles in their ranks, running around with a badge and a gun.”
Several documents filed in the case and shared with the Times Union support that claim.
A portion of a State Police investigative file shows one of their investigators in Saratoga County recommended the agency kill a probe into Coon’s alleged molestation of several boys in Ballston Spa, citing the reputational harm the publicity could bring on the storied law enforcement agency.
The State Police investigation into Coon began in September 1982, after a teenager told a trooper that Coon had sexually abused him, according to the file. Coon announced his plans to retire two weeks later, and he left the force that October without facing any discipline or criminal consequences.
Over the course of the inquiry, the State Police received allegations from at least four “young males” that Coon had made sexual advances toward them. The most recent encounter had taken place in the spring of 1981.
A week after Coon’s retirement, Saratoga County District Attorney David A. Wait, who died two years ago at age 91, declined to pursue criminal action against the extrooper, citing what he claimed was a lack of evidence and the time that had elapsed since the most recent alleged incident, according to the police files.
The investigative file included statements provided by multiple boys who described troubling interactions with Coon, who they said would often try to grope them when they slept. Their statements to State Police noted they would agree to take a lie detector test.
Still, the State Police investigator concluded his report by recommending the agency should allow Coon to quietly retire, thereby sparing the agency from any public backlash. It was a strategy — covering up allegations for serial abusers who would go on to molest more children — that also had been used by the Catholic Church, Boy Scouts of America and other institutions now facing thousands of lawsuits filed under New York’s Child Victims Act.
The investigator’s report stated: “Since the Saratoga County district attorney has elected to forego any criminal prosecution and Coon is no longer subject to division disciplinary proceedings, further investigation into this matter would only provide for possible widespread public knowledge and embarrassment to the division.”
The State Police declined to comment, citing the pending litigation.
Two years after his retirement, Coon pleaded guilty in Saratoga County to molesting three boys between the ages of 10 and 12 years old. The allegations included more than a dozen incidents that took place immediately before and after he left the police force. Coon was sentenced to three years’ probation.
A pre-sentence report filed by a county probation officer noted that Coon said he had grown lonely after his two daughters moved away and his wife died in 1982 following a battle with cancer; he had begun interacting with the boys while his wife was in the hospital. He told the probation officer that he would undergo psychiatric counseling only because his attorney wanted him to, but that he didn’t believe he had done anything wrong and that there was “never any force” used in his sexual abuse of the boys.
“When asked to more specifically describe the relationships with the boys the defendant stated that what he did was ‘normal activity that possibly exceeded acceptable limit,’” the report states. “The defendant really does not believe that he has done anything morally wrong, although he is aghast at himself for allowing things to reach the point where he had become involved criminally. He does not believe that he has really harmed anyone and that he disagrees with the way the law is written, stating that the law ‘should read to the detriment of the child.’”
He also told the probation officer that he didn’t want to reoffend, but apparently lacked any remorse when he said that he felt he had been “used” by the families of the young boys he abused, and who had initially asked him to counsel their sons, according to the report.
But the abuse did not end with the 1984 guilty plea. In 2001, Coon was sentenced to six months in jail and five years probation for sexually abusing a 9-year-old boy. In that case, a judge denied the prosecution’s request to introduce allegations at his criminal trial that Coon had sexually abused “as many as 10 underage boys during the early 1980s.”
He pleaded guilty on the eve of his trial that year. A former prosecutor said the plea had prevented the child victim from testifying in a case where they had almost no physical evidence.
Despite his conviction on felony charges of firstdegree sexual abuse, Coon was sentenced to just six months in jail and five years probation. He was also ordered to register as a sex offender.
Zekowski said that few documents remain from Coon’s personnel file with the State Police. He said the records he was able to obtain came from the Saratoga County district attorney’s office and had been gathered as part of Coon’s 1984 criminal case.
According to a court filing in Gregson’s case, Coon’s employment file with the State Police was destroyed in 2003, in accordance with applicable document retention policies.
A pattern of abuse
Statements from Coon’s alleged victims while he was still a trooper, also obtained by Gregson’s attorneys from the district attorney’s files, repeatedly allege that he had used his law enforcement status — and his troop car — to molest children during his time on the force.
In one instance, a teenager accused Coon of molesting him after pulling into a U-turn on the Northway and offering to show him how to use his radar gun.
Details shared in those statements resemble incidents described in Coon’s later criminal proceedings, including where and how the abuse happened. Like Gregson, the alleged victims said the abuse occurred in Coon’s car, at his home and at the adjacent camp.
Gregson said he remembered times when Coon had more than one boy in the Ballston Spa house, which is situated on a quiet dead-end road. In multiple cases, the alleged victims described Coon having them stay overnight at that house or the adjacent camp, and waking up to find Coon groping them.
One of the statements described a game room Coon allegedly used to entertain children in his house, furnished with items including a pinball machine, a soda fountain and a home computer, a novelty at the time.
It was in that room, Gregson said, that he was first molested by Coon.
For years, Gregson said he kept the abuse to himself. He alleges that Coon had made threats about what he’d do if Gregson ever told anyone about the abuse.
“He told me if I ever told anybody, he would take me away from my family — because they wouldn’t believe me, because he was a police officer,” Gregson said.
Gregson said the trauma of Coon’s abuse led him on a path toward addiction, self-harm and mental health challenges that have persisted in the decades since. It’s a form of fallout echoed in many of the lawsuits filed under the Child Victims Act, where victims have suffered from drug or alcohol addiction, and emotional struggles that often prevented them from establishing meaningful relationships or having successful marriages.
Gregson said that about 20 years ago he began sharing what had happened to him with mental health professionals.
A year after New York passed the Child Victim Act, he filed his claim against the state.
By now, his alleged abuser has been dead for two decades. But Gregson believes the State Police owe him some measure of justice.
“I’ve never been mentally right yet because of this,” he said. “It’s ruined my entire life.”