Oklahoma Wrestling Coach, 27, Arrested for Allegedly Having Sex With 15-year-old Girl Has Prior Rape Conviction

An Oklahoma youth wrestling coach has been arrested on charges of second-degree rape after allegedly having sex with a teenager, 15, multiple times.

Inmate records from Oklahoma County jail show Joseph Dion Martinez, 27, was detained on February 2 by the Edmond Police Department. Online records list five charges of rape in the second degree and one charge of forcible oral sodomy. Each charge had a $75,000 bond.

KFOR-TV, an NBC-affiliated television station serving Oklahoma, reported yesterday the suspect was caught after the father of the teenager found messages on a cell phone. The device, the father said, did not belong to his daughter, but had been discovered in her bedroom.

A probable cause affidavit, images of which were published by KOCO-TV, said the victim told cops her father brought her in because she was "sleeping with an older guy." The person, it was alleged, was Martinez—described in the police report as a "close family friend."

It was back in February last year when it is alleged Martinez first approached the victim via social networking app Instagram. After making contact, he allegedly asked her to talk via Snapchat, a separate application where messages have a time limit before disappearing.

He began sending her messages that were "more than friendly in nature," the affidavit read. He told her she was pretty and became "flirtatious with his conversation," it added.

Later, the suspect allegedly gave the teenager a Samsung Galaxy smartphone so they could talk privately as the girl's family was enforcing a curfew on her personal phone. According to the victim's testimony, the pair had multiple sexual encounters—at least five in total.

"We are just at the tip of the iceberg," Jenny Wagnon, an Edmond Police spokesperson, told KOCO-TV. She said that police are now investigating if other victims exist.

Court documents dug up by local media outlets revealed Martinez was convicted of second-degree rape back in 2012 for an incident involving a 14-year-old girl. Martinez, then aged 20, was given a suspended sentence and had to register as a sex offender for five years. As such, he no longer appears in a search on the Oklahoma Sex and Violent Offender Registry.

According to the fresh affidavit, the teenaged victim said she first had sex with Martinez at Lake Arcadia in Edmond while their families had been on a camping trip together.

It happened, the victim alleged, after the suspect sent her a text as the others slept. Another encounter then allegedly happened the next day while the victim's parents were in work.

According to police, in 2018 the victim traveled with the suspect to a wrestling tournament in Clinton, Oklahoma. On the journey home, they allegedly had a sexual encounter involving oral sex. The legal age of consent in the state is 16, KFOR-TV reported.

The news outlet, citing Wagnon, reported the victim's father told cops Martinez had worked with a wrestling team not specifically tied to a school. They do, however, practice at a high school's premises.