A charge of being at a facility where minors are present, filed last year against a former Mount Airy coach and teacher who is a convicted sex offender, has been dismissed.

As a condition of that dismissal, Kemp Douglas Phillips, 41, agreed to submit to GPS (Global Positioning System) monitoring as a term of probation he received when tried in 2003 on charges of having sex with female students at Mount Airy High School.

Phillips, of 230 Laurel Lane, who was released from prison in January 2008 after serving an active sentence for those offenses, was arrested again last June 16. He was charged then by Mount Airy police with violating a law prohibiting sex offenders from occupying premises where minors are regularly present.

The arrest stemmed from the ex-coach being spotted at Pro Health, a fitness and medical business on North Pointe Boulevard in Mount Airy which contains nursery child care, after-school child care and other programs that include minors. The law under which Phillips was charged specifies that convicted sex offenders may not be “at any place” where youngsters gather for regularly scheduled educational, recreational or social programs.

After several continuances, Phillips was scheduled to be in Surry District Court Tuesday for the case, but before that could happen Surry County District Attorney Ricky Bowman opted to drop the charge.

“Right Thing To Do”

Bowman said Tuesday that he believes justice has been served by this action, indicating the dismissal was partly based on the circumstances surrounding Phillips’ presence at the Pro Health which did not appear to pose a threat to minors.

Once the charge was filed in June, Bowman said further information uncovered by an investigator on his staff revealed that Phillips had been working out at Pro Health for almost a year. The former coach advised the management there from the start that he was a convicted sex offender, the district attorney further said.

In addition, Phillips was always at the center only during the early morning hours, well before the day-care facility at Pro Health opened at 9 a.m. “They were making every effort to make sure he had no contact with children,” Bowman said of those involved.

The district attorney added that Pro Health officials seemed upset that the former coach, who led Mount Airy’s boys’ basketball team to a state championship in 2001, had been charged with the latest violation. They were prepared to come to court to testify on his behalf, Bowman said.

At some point as officials pondered the disposition of the matter, the probation officer assigned to Phillips’ case suggested a possible resolution involving the terms of his probation being modified, or toughened, to include the GPS satellite-based monitoring. Phillips agreed to those terms, according to Bowman.

“I decided to dismiss the case” as a result, he said. That action occurred in January.

Bowman said that for his part, Phillips — who spent more than four years in prison — has been cooperative and living up to his end of the bargain, including abiding by the law prohibiting his presence at facilities such as Pro Health. “To my knowledge, he has not been back,” the district attorney said of the Mount Airy fitness center.

He said the dismissal of the case against Phillips “was the right thing to do” when all elements were taken into consideration. Bowman added that there are occasions when prosecutors should be more concerned with seeking justice than convictions.

“And I think this was one of those times.”

Probation Violations

Dismissed

Brian Gates, who heads probation operations in Surry and Stokes counties, said this week that seven felony probation-violation counts filed against Phillips by his office in the wake of the June charge also have been dropped. Those counts, which relate to the original offenses for which Phillips received probationary sentences, were a direct result of him being accused in June, since that constituted an alleged violation of conditions involved.

Along with the active sentence imposed in 2003, Phillips was ordered to be on probation for 48 months upon his release. That has required him to be under the regular supervision of a probation officer and meet other terms, to which the GPS monitoring now has been added.

Under the GPS system, cell-phone towers are used to generate downloads that pinpoint an offender’s location and serve to prevent the person from being in an off-limits area, such as a facility where minors are present, Gates explained. Probation personnel receive electronic notifications of offenders’ presence in such “exclusion zones,” he said.

In North Carolina, satellite-based monitoring for certain sexual offenders is required for life, but that will not be the case for Phillips, Gates said. He was unsure about the total length of the monitoring.

Lt. Jim Armbrister of the Mount Airy Police Department, the arresting officer for the most recent charge against Phillips, said Tuesday that issuing the violation last June was something the department was “obligated” to do under the law.

He said city police will persist in monitoring such alleged violations by sex offenders. “We’ll maintain that vigilance, because we’re here to enforce the law,” Armbrister added. He said officers will continue to fulfill their responsibility and leave it up to court officials “to do what they deem is appropriate.”

Contact Tom Joyce at tjoyce@mtairynews.com or at 719-1924.