SIOUX CITY — For two months, a female Sioux City North High School student's meetings with Abdier Marrero often included him touching her buttocks as she entered and exited his guidance office and continued after she told him she didn't like it.
Once he began asking her to meet him daily, sometimes more than once a day, including in his office after school, the student reported his actions to an adult at the school.
"I wasn't comfortable in that situation anymore, and I needed to tell an adult. This was really crossing a boundary," the girl testified Thursday, the second day of Marrero's trial. "I knew what happened to me was wrong. I didn't want something bad to happen to me."
Marrero, 41, a former North High cross country and track coach and guidance counselor, is charged in Woodbury County District Court with one count of sexual exploitation by a school employee. He resigned in December 2021 after girls on the cross country team reported to school officials he had slapped many of them on the butt and made comments to them about their bodies from 2018 through 2021. He was arrested in July 2022 and has pleaded not guilty.
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Four of his former runners, all of whom have since graduated from high school, testified Wednesday Marrero had slapped them on the butt, commented on their body, or both, and his behavior had become so ordinary, it was accepted as part of the team's culture.
"It felt very normalized on the team, kind of a don't say anything culture on the team," the girl who would later inform a fellow coach about Marrero's actions said Thursday.
The girl said Marrero slapped her butt at least two dozen times at practice during her sophomore season. But when he called her to his office, she said, after closing the door, he would touch her differently, grabbing her rather than slapping her "almost every time I went in." Some of the meetings ended with a hug in which he would reach down and grab her butt, the girl said.
"I knew it was definitely unusual, and I tried to rationalize it," she said. "I voiced that I didn't enjoy the physical contact in general."
The touching persisted, she said, and Marrero often called himself her future husband, a running joke between them in reference to the girl once telling him she wanted to be a doctor with a stay at home husband. She testified she sensed the joking took a sexual turn when he told her "wait until the wedding night" and "once you're 18."
"There was definitely weird undertones to it," said the girl, the second to testify Thursday.
She and another cross country team member who testified before her said Marrero had suggested the girls cross country team get new uniforms with bikini-style shorts similar to those female athletes wear in college and the Olympics and much smaller than what most high school teams wear.
"You girls would look good wearing these," Marrero told them, the first girl said.
Both girls said that during conversations with Marrero, he would look at their breasts rather than look them in the eye. Marrero told the second girl another runner was slower one season "because she came back with a huge rack," referring to her breasts' growth from the previous season.
"I think it showed how much he was really observing us," the girl said.
The Journal is not identifying the girls by name, though they are being addressed by name in court.
Marrero's attorney, Patrick Parry challenged statements made by both girls, pointing out differences between their testimony to statements made during their depositions in December.
During her deposition, the second girl never defined Marrero's actions in his office as grabbing, only slapping. She said in her deposition that on only one occasion did Marrero touch her butt while hugging her. She testified Thursday it happened 15-20 times. The girl told Parry the deposition was an intimidating situation and had flustered her.
As he had with previous witnesses, Parry challenged her use of the word "normalized," a term each girl has used to describe Marrero's behavior with the girls team. When she reported Marrero to school officials, the girl provided the names of other girls. She denied telling them what to say or what words to use.
"They've probably heard me use it," she said.
She, like the others who testified, said Marrero never made explicitly sexual comments to her or tried to kiss her.
"Was it ever clear that he was trying to date you, put the moves on you, anything like that?" Parry asked her.
"No," she said.
The trial is scheduled to resume Friday and could be submitted to the jury in the afternoon. If found guilty, Marrero could face up to five years in prison.