Sex assault trial for Alpena man underway
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ALPENA -- Nearly four years after the state charged an Alpena man with sexually assaulting several underage girls, Todd Allen Agar appeared in Alpena's 26th Circuit Court for trial on Tuesday.
Police say Agar, now 52, coerced several minors into sexual acts with him after plying them with alcohol in 2005, when he was in his mid-30s, and repeatedly molested and ultimately raped a girl when she was between the ages of 6 and 11.
Agar has pleaded not guilty.
Initially charged with the sexual assaults in late 2018, Agar shook off the charges a year later when a judge ruled that attorneys had violated Agar's right to a speedy trial.
Agar was immediately recharged, with additional charges added after a new witness agreed to testify.
Further delays in Agar's case, many of them necessitated by Agar's repeated firing of his attorneys or motions he filed from prison -- where he is held on a drug-related sentence out of Alpena County stemming from 2014 charges -- stretched the case over several years.
On Tuesday, the first day of Agar's trial, prospective jurors were unexpectedly dismissed after Agar's last-minute request to have his case heard by a judge instead.
Witnesses during the first day of testimony described Agar's alleged assaults.
One woman told Judge Jason Elmore that Agar forced sexual touch on her at the Alpena home of a mutual acquaintance, starting when she was 6 years old.
The News does not identify survivors of sexual assault without their consent.
Shame and Agar's threats that he would also hurt her sister kept her from telling anyone as the encounters escalated in roughness and variety, the woman said.
Later, after the abuse had stopped and the woman was no longer a child, she didn't tell police all the details of the assaults because she didn't want to endure the trauma of talking about what he had done to her, she told the judge.
A second woman who testified Tuesday said she, too, avoided telling anyone when, she said, Agar sexually assaulted her when she was 14.
On one day in 2005, the woman and two friends from school drank alcohol Agar bought them, and then he intimately touched and otherwise sexually assaulted them, she said.
Agar's trial continues Wednesday and is expected to last through Thursday or Friday.
Elmore, of Wexford and Missaukee counties, is presiding over Agar's trial because the case would pose a conflict of interest for Judge Ed Black, of Alpena's 26th Circuit Court, who filed the original first-degree sexual assault charges against Agar as then-Alpena County prosecutor.