by James Varney
Brent and Donna McGee were the “First Couple” of Wetumka, Oklahoma. He was athletic director and football coach at the high school who had once served as mayor; she was superintendent of the school system.
And as if all those levers of local power weren’t enough, they also owned the Dairy Queen, the prime hangout in this small rural town and a key source of high school jobs.
That all came crashing down on Aug. 21 when Brent McGee was arrested for sexually abusing minors for decades. The arrest of the former coach may have shocked many in the town of roughly 1,500, but it came as no surprise to Casey Yochum, who had been one of McGee’s star athletes when he played football and soccer at nearby Noble High School at various times in the early 1990s.
“He was always ‘the cool coach,’” Yochum told RealClearInvestigations. “He’d buy booze, you could drink at his apartment, talk about girls – he’d maybe pay your dental bill, or for a haircut. Then he said, ‘What if I bought you a car?’ Now what kid doesn’t want a car to go play college football?”
But McGee wanted something in return, according to Yochum. First, it was watching porn at his apartment, and gradually it became Yochum performing masturbation on McGee. The coach used a code word known only to the two – “a Pablo,” which Yochum said teammates wouldn’t pick up on when the coach used it in front of them since he would commonly use some Spanish words with the football team.
McGee’s arrest came three weeks after two other former Wetumka High School students filed a federal lawsuit against him, Donna McGee, and the Independent School District there on Aug. 2. In addition to the seven counts of child sexual abuse, McGee was also charged with one count of engaging in a pattern of criminal offense.
William Lunn, a Tulsa attorney who has spoken with McGee about representing him, said McGee contests all charges made against him and expects to go to trial.
McGee’s arrest is an outlier in the shadowy realm of sexual abuse by school employees. Research estimates only 5% of K-12 sexual misconduct cases are turned over to law enforcement, and only a fraction of those result in prosecutions. More telling is the many years he may have gotten away with his alleged crimes.
Pointing to the widely covered cases of sexual abuse against minors in the Roman Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts, experts say alleged predators often take advantage of the marked power imbalance between themselves and their victims. This dynamic is driving the widespread yet largely ignored epidemic of sexual abuse at the nation’s secondary schools.
In addition to their ability to manipulate inexperienced children, many predators prosper in education through their ability to gain positions of trust and high standing within a school, a reputation that often shields them from allegations of dubious behavior. Attorneys and experts who have studied the issue also say the predators are often protected by employment contracts, union membership, or bureaucratic inertia and failures that allow them to move from one school to another, racking up more victims along the way. The phenomenon is so prevalent it has a name: “passing the trash.”
Since 2010, there have been at least 149 such employees in Oklahoma, according to state Rep. Sherrie Conley. Conley, a key sponsor of a new law to guard against school sexual abuse, said she has been shocked by what she’s learned.
“Here in Oklahoma, all the players – either those directly involved or who just enable it – cover for each other,” Conley said. “It usually turns out that people who knew didn’t want to tarnish the reputation of a school or didn’t investigate charges thoroughly because they just don’t want the messiness.”
The relatively few cases that lead to headlines and arrests often result not from the investigative tenacity of school systems and law enforcement but the willingness of victims to call out their alleged molesters, often at great personal cost.
McGee would likely never have been arrested were it not for Yochum’s work to bring him to justice – after decades of repressing memories of his abuse. For years, Yochum, who grew up in a single-parent home and had looked up to McGee as a father figure, could not understand why he was so troubled. He drank heavily and had run-ins with the law. Eventually, he sobered up, joined the Army and served a tour in Afghanistan.
That sort of delayed timeline is not uncommon with victims of sexual abuse who have been targeted and played by predators who convince them the relationship is something special, according to Glenn Lipson, a clinical psychologist who has worked with the FBI and SESAME (Stop Educator Sexual Abuse Misconduct & Exploitation).
“A lot of people will see something in the media, or finally make a special relationship with someone, and realize they were fooled, that what happened to them was not unique,” Lipson said.
In August 2019, as one of McGee’s former stars, Yochum was asked to speak at a Noble High School ceremony honoring the former coach. He did so and felt “sick in my soul,” afterward.
But Yochum did not make the connection between the alleged abuse and his mental storms until afterward when a blind date asked him to tell her something about him no one else knew.
“I just blurted out, ‘I was molested by my high school soccer coach,’” Yochum recalled. “It hit me like a baseball bat. It just flew out of my mouth, and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.”
Eyes open, Yochum sought out McGee again. He reached out to his former coach, and on Nov. 28, 2020, a date Yochum remembers like his birthday, he drove to Wetumka and picked up McGee to hash things out.
It was just the two men in Yochum’s pickup truck, along with a recording device Yochum had hidden. On the tape, some of which has been made public by an Oklahoma Substack site, V1SUT, the two discussed what had happened between them back in Noble. Yochum took his tape to the FBI.
“I was trying to devise a case to catch him because I knew I wasn’t the only one,” Yochum said.
The feds told him the statute of limitations had run out on his case, but Yochum still pursued it. At one time or another over the next two years, he said, law enforcement agencies from the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigations and the Hughes County Sheriff’s Office looked into it. None of them responded to questions and phone calls from RealClearInvestigations.
Then, in 2022, the FBI asked Yochum if he could tape McGee again, this time with the bureau’s equipment. They wired him up in the parking lot of a nearby Dollar General and Yochum said he repeated the process he’d done two years earlier. The FBI said it turned over the case to state authorities and declined to comment further.
In September 2022, FBI agents showed up at Wetumka High School and said McGee could not be around children. At the end of that school year in 2023, Donna McGee retired, and the state education department ordered Brent McGee to surrender his teaching license, a process he declined to appeal.
Yet still nothing happened. When RCI first spoke with Yochum days before the arrest, he was seething at what he considered law enforcement’s unnecessary delays, which he believes put other young men at risk.
“I’m 100 percent not OK with it,” he said.
Four days prior to the arrest, District Attorney Erik Johnson denied he was neglecting the case, which had been turned over to him in January.
“I have my top investigators focused on this case, but I will not be swayed or pressured to act before I’m confident with it,” Johnson said.
It wasn’t as if more flags about McGee had not been raised. Last November, Zachary Williams, one of the best players on the Wetumka High football team, was taken out of a rivalry game. He was seething on the sideline, and according to witnesses, Donna McGee came down from the stands to try to comfort Williams.
“Your husband raped me!” Williams began to shout, according to multiple accounts of the alleged incident, three decades after McGee’s alleged encounters with Yochum.
Williams and Brandon Rhinehart, another football player and DQ employee, are plaintiffs in the federal suit. While they did not respond to a request for comment, their attorney, Laurie Koller, said Yochum has been there for the young men. “Casey has really helped them cope with what happened to them,” she said.
On Aug. 22, McGee posted a $250,000 bond and left in the custody of his wife. The couple have not commented publicly.
As for Yochum, he expressed exhaustion and elation and said he expects the case against McGee to grow.
“I’ve had other people contact me on Facebook, claiming they were victims but wondering if they could remain anonymous,” he said. “All of that, and I can tell you Brent has expressed zero remorse.”
– – –
James Varney is a writer for RealClearInvestigations.
Photo “Brent McGee” by District Attorney Erik Johnson.
