Arapahoe County – Prosecutors on Tuesday displayed photos of 18 boys and one girl onto a video screen, saying they were the victims of a man in his 30s who passed himself off as a young teen so he could meet and sexually assault children.
Zuri-Kye McGhee’s defense attorney discounted the charges, saying the allegations were embellishments from parents angered that McGhee duped them.
Defense attorney Ted Stavish said parents must share blame for letting their children “hang out” with McGhee.
The jury was handed the case Tuesday afternoon and will continue deliberating today.
McGhee faces 75 counts, mostly felony sexual abuse charges. If convicted, he could face life in prison.
The 12-day trial featured 60 prosecution witnesses, many of them teens who said they were assaulted dozens, if not hundreds, of times.
“He was good,” Deputy District Attorney Christine Schober said in her closing arguments. “By acting as a child … only in that way did this defendant maneuver himself into the lives of all of these good people. … All to satisfy his desire.”
Stavish disagreed, saying the sexual-abuse allegations are a hysterical reaction by parents.
“The revelation of his age has got to have sent all of these families into just a real dark place,” he said. “It has to be a terrible realization that they were letting their children hang out with an adult. Then there’s the panic.”
McGhee in 1998 was charged with 23 felony counts of criminal sexual contact with a minor, pleading guilty in 1999 to one felony of contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
Prosecutors said the abuse in Colorado began in early 2000, when McGhee befriended an Aurora family and went with one boy to Arkansas Elementary School in Aurora. There, he led other children to believe he was a student, Schober said.
The muscular McGhee began hosting workout sessions and parties at his apartment, Schober said. Children would come to his home to play video games, and parents trusted McGhee because of his polite manners, Schober said. They would let their children go to his home for sleepovers, and McGhee even moved in with one family, she said.
But the young witnesses testified the parties or workouts would quickly turn sexual, with McGhee showing porn movies and forcing the children to masturbate, Schober said. He would threaten beatings if they didn’t cooperate or if they told their parents, she said.
Stavish couldn’t explain why McGhee passed himself off as a young teen, saying “it was a bizarre thing.”
Nevertheless, Stavish said, the witnesses’ testimony was embellished and not consistent.
“It snowballed to where we don’t know what’s true,” he said. “He engaged in bizarre behavior for a 31-year-old man. But there has to be reasonable doubt based on the lack of credibility of these witnesses.”
Staff writer Jeremy P. Meyer can be reached at 303-820-1175 or jpmeyer@denverpost.com.
