Coach charged with fatally punching child

The girl's mother is charged with aggravated child neglect and child abuse after the 2-year-old is found dead.

Eric Trigg, right, is taken into a waiting police car by Tampa police Detective Kevin Durkin outside Tampa police headquarters Tuesday. [Times photos: Dirk Shadd]

By KATHRYN WEXLER and SARAH LUECK

© St. Petersburg Times, published June 9, 1999

TAMPA -- An assistant football coach at Plant High School was charged Tuesday with fatally punching his girlfriend's 2-year-old daughter in the stomach and then tossing her out a two-story window to make it appear as though she died from the fall.

Police say April Reeves, who faces aggravated child neglect and child abuse charges, saw Trigg hit her children.

Investigators said Eric Trigg, 30, told them he hit the toddler, April Casey, on Saturday after he became angry that she had soiled herself and was being noisy in an upstairs bedroom, where she and her 3-year-old brother were kept during the day. Trigg was charged with first-degree murder.

Also charged Tuesday was April's mother, April Reeves. Police said the 23-year-old mother of six had seen her boyfriend strike her children with his hands and leather straps, and left them in his care anyway.

April already had suffered a broken rib from one of Trigg's beatings, according to an arrest affidavit. Reeves was charged with aggravated child neglect and child abuse.

Still, detectives said, Reeves had a soft spot for Trigg, a 300-pounder with shoulders so broad police had to use two sets of handcuffs to link his hands behind his back before taking him Tuesday to jail.

Reeves, who police said works as a nurse's aide for St. Joseph's Hospital, is pregnant with Trigg's child. She also has a 1-year-old son who bears his father's name: Eric Gillespie Trigg Jr.

Reeves and Trigg met four years ago at a friend's house, and he moved in some months ago, according to arrest reports.

"She was real proud of the fact she's having her seventh child and went on and on about how this is the first man that's lived with her," Detective Jackie Keene said Tuesday.

At their run-down Central Park apartment, at 1145 E Harrison St., Trigg enforced a double standard for his own son, Eric, police said. April and her older brother were kept upstairs for 10 hours a day while Reeves was at work, Keene said. The room held a single mattress and dresser. There were no toys, no TV and no bathroom, Keene said.

"He does not check on them; he doesn't feed them, doesn't give them drinks until Mom comes home," Keene said. "I think he hated those children. He kept telling me those are not his children. The one that is his is downstairs with him."

Officials said they are considering additional charges that hinge on whether the children were kept locked in the room.

Trigg told investigators that April was standing on the dresser, next to the window, and was leaning over the sill when he struck her back. April then tumbled out of the window, he told officials.

The child lay on the ground for several hours in an ant hill -- "I pray to god she wasn't alive," Keene said.

The Medical Examiner's Office found that April sustained only a "very minor" head injury from the fall, but had "massive" injuries to her abdomen and a lacerated liver and kidneys caused by abuse. Keene is skeptical the children were able to move such a heavy dresser to the window, as Trigg said.

When Reeves came home and went looking for her missing daughter, Trigg pretended to discover her outside, Keene said.

The Department of Children and Families took temporary custody of Reeves' two boys after April's death Saturday.

It wasn't the first time the state removed her children. In April 1994, officials found that Reeves was neglecting three other children and placed them under protective supervision for about 18 months.

In 1996, the case was closed and the children were returned to Reeves unconditionally. They ended up living with their biological father, said Tom Jones, spokesman for the department.

Since then, there had been no new complaints against Reeves, so case workers hadn't checked on her, Jones said.

In March 1994, Reeves' 7-week-old daughter died from what the medical examiner listed as a congenital heart defect. Keene said she is examining the circumstances surrounding that death as well.

Police said Trigg told them he had worked for the Department of Juvenile Justice, but officials there said they had no record of his employment.

Plant High School football coach Darlee Nelson, who has known Trigg for more than 10 years, said Trigg was a motivated instructor and well-liked by students.

"Players loved playing for him," said Nelson, who coached with Trigg at Jefferson High School. "He was always deep in thought and working on strategy."

When Nelson transferred to Plant High in 1998, he hired Trigg as his assistant linebackers' coach. Working as a full-time football coach was something Trigg dreamed of, he wrote in a statement to officials in 1993, describing why he shouldn't have to pay more than $450 monthly to support three children he'd fathered.

In the handwritten statement, Trigg blamed layoffs and physical injury for his "short and unstable" work history, and said he lived with his mother.

But he said coaching brought out his better side.

"I try my best to teach this next group of young men the importance of being a responsible and productive person," he wrote. His efforts to reduce the payments were denied.

Even before then, problems were surfacing.

In 1991, he was charged with battery of his ex-wife, Sonia Martinez, according to court documents. Trigg pleaded no contest and was sentenced to 12 months' probation.

Four years later, when he failed to send Martinez child support payments, he was sentenced to about five months in jail, court records show. By that time, Martinez was one of three women collecting money for children Trigg has fathered.

Throughout the years, his wages were garnished. As recently as last December, officials were going after Trigg in court for not paying Reeves enough to care for their son, Eric.

Nelson said the allegations Tuesday don't reflect the man he knows.

"I've known him almost all his life and it's amazing to me that something like this could surround him," Nelson said.

But not everyone was so surprised. Pia Butler-Smith, who had a child with Trigg in 1986, said Trigg was a "nice, easy-going guy" until she became pregnant with his child, now 12.

After having children with other women, Butler-Smith said, he began to "play favorites." Her daughter wasn't one of them, she said.

"He would see my daughter when he felt like it, which wasn't very often," she said. Butler-Smith said Trigg chastised her daughter, Sierra Trigg, more harshly than the others, to the point where Butler-Smith became so concerned that two years ago she stopped all visits.

The new allegations against Trigg didn't completely surprise her, she said.

'"If he doesn't have regard for his own children, how is he going to have regard for anyone else's?" Butler-Smith said.

In his court statement six years ago, Trigg closed on a deprecating note.

"Thank you for hearing my plea and also for being so understanding of my problem: of the heart," he wrote.

-- Staff writers Scott Purks, Sarah Schweitzer and Wayne Washington contributed to this report.