Former coach gets jail time
Wlater Ferinden sentenced to one year behind bars for unlawful sexual contact with minors
A 57-year-old former Towamencin man who once coached youth ice hockey and held skating clinics throughout the region has been sentenced in Delaware court to one year in jail for sex crimes against minors, according to an article in The News Journal.
Walter W. “Tracy” Ferinden, formerly of the 1000 block of Towamencin Avenue, was arrested in March 2017 and initially faced two counts of sexual assault in New Jersey and nine counts of unlawful sexual contact in Delaware after a joint investigation by New Castle County (Delaware) police and the Gloucester County (New Jersey) Prosecutor’s Office
that was launched in June of 2016, Delaware law enforcement authorities said at that time.
Ferinden pleaded guilty to two counts of unlawful sexual contact in June 2018 in Delaware, the News Journal article states. In New Jersey in September 2018, he pleaded guilty to two counts of aggravated sexual contact, and two counts of sexual assault were dismissed,
according to an article by The Associated Press.
According to a New Jersey criminal complaint filed against Ferinden, a man told investigators that in the summer of 1994, when he was 12 years old and attending a hockey camp where Ferinden was his coach, Ferinden sexually assaulted him on two separate occasions at Ferinden’s apartment in Deptford, N.J.
New Castle police, meanwhile, said that two men reported that Ferinden sexually
abused them when they were juveniles and Ferinden was their hockey coach in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
According to online records, Ferinden is currently in custody at the Howard R. Young Correctional Institution in Wilmington, Del.
Gloucester County prosecutors said that Ferinden coached youth hockey and conducted skating clinics in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New York and Vermont through the 1990s and as recently as 2010.