The madness in this troubled world we share never ends.
Who would believed that Fayetteville High’s former teacher, athletics director and coach who led the 2009 basketball Bulldogs to a state championship could tumble overnight from the pinnacle of community influence into a dark abyss all through his own choices?
Yet anyone who examined Barry Gebhart’s history might also have detected a trail of potential trouble leading up to his catastrophic downfall last week at the Pinnacle Hills Promenade mall in Rogers. I’ll now add the obvious (yet necessary) reminder that Gebhart remains innocent until proven otherwise in a Benton County court.
This fashionable mall is where the Benton County sheriff’s office deputies with the cybercrimes unit were waiting to arrest the 50-year-old Gebhart. Posing for weeks as a 14-year-old girl, the undercover officers said they’d been chatting and exchanging photographs with the athletic director over the Internet. And some of the pictures received from Gebhart’s computer were alleged to be as explicit as personal pictures can get.
The deputies said Gebhart arrived at the mall in a school-district-owned car to rendezvous with their fictitious girl about 7 p.m., where instead he met with a set of handcuffs. Just imagine that revelatory moment. Gebhart was charged with Internet stalking of a child. Now out on $75,000 bond awaiting a Dec. 2 arraignment, he’s wisely chosen to resign from his school position.
It’s never made sense to me that some people, especially men, who work entire lives to build a family and career and earn an honorable and respected reputation choose to risk losing it all through monumentally stupid actions. Yes, I see them as stupid rather than ignorant because these men know better. We know the list of influential men who’ve fallen (albeit not all for criminal misconduct) in the recent past stretches from Penn State to Coach Bobby Petrino to former U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner and on and on, even locally.
Let Gebhart’s latest downfall be yet another warning to all current adult stalkers with computers.
Benton County Sheriff Kelley Cradduck said he, too, never has understood the mindset of accomplished people who willingly engage in self-destructive behavior. He believes such downfalls involve personality traits that include arrogance and one’s ego overwhelming judgment and common sense. “A person I respect once said no matter how hard I tried to figure out what causes good people to do bad things, I never would know because their actions usually just can’t be satisfactorily explained,” Cradduck said.
Cradduck said he had officers double-check everything about Gebhart’s case to be fully confident before making an arrest. “That’s what they did,” he said. I asked how long this kind of thing might have been happening with Gebhart. Cradduck indicated it had been a considerable length of time. “I’ll just say this wasn’t the man’s first rodeo,” he said.
The sheriff told me that, since taking office in January, he’s made it clear that his cybercrimes unit (though limited in number) always is watching aggressively. And if they caught someone in such a crime, the perpetrator could expect to be arrested. “We are watching these people as they are watching others,” he said, adding that the list of those his department has arrested include a school bus driver and now Fayetteville’s high school athletics director. “They mistakenly believe they somehow are protected when they’re not.”
And parents beware, neither are the teenagers who do respond to online predators.
I also asked Washington County Sheriff Tim Helder for his thoughts about Gebhart’s arrest. “I think when it comes to matters of Internet and pornography, what often happens is some men will dip their toe into the water to check this stuff out then quickly find themselves immersed deep into something they never expected,” Helder said, adding that by then, many already are hooked and it becomes nothing but personally destructive.
A 1981 graduate of Fayetteville High School, Gebhart in 1986 became a teacher, then the boy’s basketball coach. He became the school’s athletics director in 2009 after winning the state basketball championship that same year. In 2013, he was earning $101,917 a year.
I can’t fathom how many are affected by Gebhart’s arrest. There is his family, friends, former players and their parents, colleagues, and the school itself.
Events during Gebhart’s life, it seems to me, could have foreshadowed the problem he’s facing today. In 2008, one news account says, Gebhart’s wife was arrested on a domestic battery charge that wasn’t prosecuted. She told police she suspected her husband was viewing Internet pornography because he wouldn’t allow her to review what was on the home computer.
The same news story says his older brother, Gregory Lee Gebhart of West Fork, was sentenced to prison after pleading guilty in 2009 to possessing, distributing or viewing child pornography. In that case, police said they discovered multiple videos and photos of children engaging in explicit sexual conduct. Following his release, Gregory Gebhart was required to register as a sex offender.
And now comes this similarly sad saga for Gregory’s younger brother, Barry.
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Mike Masterson’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at mikemasterson10@hotmail.com. Read his blog at mikemastersonsmessenger.com.
Editorial, Pages 15 on 10/29/2013