Nikolay Kalka, a Pentecostal pastor, is on trial for sexually assaulting a girl in a swimming pool.
Cory Shaffer, a reporter for Cleveland.com, reports:
75-year-old Ukrainian-born pastor testified Tuesday that he did not grope a 10-year-old girl and hold her head under water at the Middleburg Heights Recreation Center pool.
Nikolay Kalka, of Parma Heights, carried his oxygen mask and tank to the stand and told jurors through a translator that the girl and her friend splashed him, so he grabbed her and held her head beneath the stream of a gushing fountain for nearly a full minute to teach the pair a lesson.
“I was doing it out of love because I wanted to show them what it was like to splash at people,” Kalka said through the translator.
He did not, he insisted, grope the girl.
“It couldn’t have even come to my mind to do such a thing,” he said. “I live my life a certain way. I’ve been a pastor.”
Prosecutors on Tuesday presented their entire case against Kalka, who faces more than a decade in prison if he is convicted of gross sexual imposition and kidnapping charges that say he touched the girl with a sexual motivation.
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The girl and her friend, who each have turned 11 since the March 11 incident, testified that Kalka grabbed and squeezed the girl’s breast and vagina as she struggled to free herself from his grasp.
Grainy surveillance video of the incident showed the encounter, and that the friend grabbed the girl’s arm and tried to pull her free as Kalka continued to hold onto her.
“I was feeling really uncomfortable and unsafe, and really scared,” the girl told jurors after she broke down in tears earlier on the stand.
Kalka’s version of the story — that he had been fed up with the girls splashing him and his denial that he ever touched the girl’s vagina and breast — seemed to contradict his lawyer’s theory in opening statements.
Marein told jurors Tuesday morning that Kalka “probably did” touch the girl’s private parts. The video, which Marein said “speaks for itself,” clearly shows Kalka grabbing the girl and her struggling to get away. But Marein painted the encounter as “horseplay.”
“Could it have happened? Of course it could have,” Marein said. “Am I hear to say that she is a liar? No. I’m here to suggest to you that this was done without any sexual purpose whatsoever, that this was blown incredibly out of proportion and that this is completely inconsistent with the life that this man has led.”
Kalka, a Pentecostal pastor in his home country, came to the U.S. in 1990 to escape religious persecution under the Communist regime of the Soviet Union. He formed a small neighborhood church after settling in Cleveland.
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But Assistant Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Jennifer Driscoll repeatedly pointed to the video, which showed that the girls swam up to him and splashed him in the pool’s whirlpool section. He splashed them back.
The girls later approached Kalka near a fountain in the kiddie pool and start splashing him again. The lifeguard on duty that day, Nathaniel French, testified that the girls looked happy and he thought they were horsing around with Kalka, who he thought may have been their grandfather.
Then Kalka grabbed the girl.
He forced her head under the stream of the fountain. He held her there for nearly a minute. The friend, after failing to rip the girl free, went to summon French.
Kafka let the girl go, walked into the pool’s steam room and sauna, then to the locker room before a police officer at the rec center arrested him.
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Driscoll hammered Kalka on cross-examination. She asked if he felt her trying to get away.
“Yes, I could tell she was trying to get away, but I wanted her to get wet from the fountain,” Kalka said through the translator.
Driscoll, in a raised voice, asked if he would approve of a strange man grabbing his grandchild and holding them underwater against their will. When Kalka said he treated the girls as his own grandchildren, Driscoll asked if he ever held his own children against their will and groped them.
“Children when they see me, they just run to me,” a clearly flustered Kalka said.
Driscoll pointed out the girls were trying to run from him, not to him.
“No, they weren’t running away from me,” he replied. “I love them, they love me. And the little ones just run all over me and I have to listen to what they want.”
Update
A Ukranian-born pastor who faced a potential life sentence for groping a 10-year-old girl at the Middleburg Heights Recreation Center pool this summer was instead sentenced to five years in prison on Thursday.
Dozens of 75-year-old Nikolay Kalka’s friends and family wailed after Judge Kathleen Ann Sutula sent the ailing man to prison for five years, and exchanged words with the judge over the sobs of Kalka’s wife and children.
“Twelve jurors found him guilty, not this court,” Sutula replied. “Watch the video. God saw.”
Kalka faced a potential mandatory life sentence with his first shot at parole in 10 years after a jury found him guilty last month of kidnapping the child with sexual motivation at the pool on May 11.
But Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Michael O’Malley’s office asked Judge Kathleen Ann Sutula to sentence him instead on two counts of gross sexual imposition, which carried a maximum of five years in prison each.
Sutula ran the counts concurrent to one another, “only out of mercy, not because I don’t think you deserve the full 10 years,” she said.
Kalka will also have to register as a sex offender every six months for the next 25 years.
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