Sex offender who groomed teen girl from inside Lorain County prison sent back for 18 months

ELYRIA — A convicted sex offender who groomed a teenage girl from behind prison walls in an attempt to have a future sexual relationship with her was sent back Wednesday to serve up to 18 more months in prison. In a victim impact statement she gave in Lorain County Common Pleas Court, the mother of the victim called Zachary Foulke "a master manipulator and a liar" who tore her family apart by getting between her and her daughter. Judge Christopher Rothgery sentenced Foulke, 37, of Springfield in Clark County, on 22 counts of importuning, all fourth-degree felonies, and one count of grooming, a misdemeanor. Foulke will be on post-release control, formerly called parole, for a mandatory five years upon release from prison. Foulke will serve less than the 18 months. Jailed since July on the pending charges, he is entitled by law to 170 days or just under six months credit for time already served awaiting trial. The sentence was agreed to by the victim's family, and worked out by agreement between the Lorain County Prosecutor's Office and Foulke's attorney, Ian Crawford. Importuning is the crime of soliciting a minor for sexual activity. Grooming is the crime of enticing, coercing, soliciting or preparing a minor for sexual activity. Already a convicted sex offender, Foulke declined to say anything and sat stone-faced as the victim and her mother read prepared statements to the court. The Chronicle-Telegram does not identify child victims of sex crimes. The teenage victim described how she and her mother met Foulke, a friend of her father's from high school, in 2024. Prosecutors said they were introduced at the Clark County Fair. Foulke brought his niece with him "leading us to believe he was a safe person," the girl said. "I was wrong," she said. In tears, the teen said she couldn't finish her statement, so Assistant Prosecutor Mark Koza finished reading it for her. The girl wrote he was like an uncle, and that she told him things she only shared with people she trusted. Foulke used that information to "drive a wedge between me and my dad and began to fill my mind with lies trying to push me away from my mother," the girl wrote. "I thought he was a good man and I was wrong," she wrote, adding later: "I didn't realize the damage he had done until it was too late." Prosecutors said Foulke was serving time in Lorain Correctional Institution in Grafton on a parole violation when he began communicating with the victim, then 15, in an attempt to have sex with her. While in prison, Foulke exchanged more than 8,500 online messages and 1,500 phone calls with the girl between January and July 2025. At least eight of the online messages were sexual, which also made them illegal because the age of consent in Ohio is 16. The prosecutor's office said Foulke and the girl planned to meet up at the Clark County Fair in July 2025. By that time, Foulke had convinced the girl to let him to get her pregnant, but their communications and the plan were discovered before that happened. The State Highway Patrol, which investigates crimes on Ohio prison property, investigated the case. The teen wrote that she is in therapy, but still "scared, hurt, angry and devastated." She doesn't trust anyone and blames herself for what happened, Koza said, reading from her statement. Foulke was convicted of unlawful sexual conduct with a minor and pandering obscenity involving a minor in Clark County in 2017, sentenced to four years in prison and ordered to register as a sex offender until at least 2042. He also has felony convictions for arson and breaking and entering out of Clark County. The girl's mother said Foulke, despite being a "weak" man, made her family's life a living hell. "He put lies in my daughter's head," the woman said, pausing to wipe away tears. Contact Dave O'Brien at (440) 329-7129 or dobrien@chroniclet.com