FREMONT, Neb. — A Midland University athletic department official faces two felonies stemming from an alleged incident in October 2023.
Dodge County Attorney Pamela Hopkins on Monday filed charges against Midland University Associate Athletics Director Steven D. Heimann, 50, a former UNO football player and former coach of the Omaha Beef. He’s also held various assistant and head coaching positions at colleges throughout the Midwest, including at Nebraska Wesleyan University and Tabor College in Kansas.
Hired at Midland in September 2023 after a five-year stint as head football coach at Presentation College in Aberdeen, South Dakota, Heimann is charged with first-degree sexual assault and unlawful intrusion without consent, both felonies.
Under Nebraska law, the unlawful intrusion without consent crime is related to when a person is alleged to “knowingly and intentionally photograph, film or otherwise record an image or video of the intimate area of any other person without his or her knowledge and consent when his or her intimate area would not be generally visible to the public.”
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Heimann did not respond to the Fremont Tribune’s attempts to contact him at his residence or to messages sent through relatives. The Tribune also contacted Midland University officials to inquire about Heimann’s employment status, but Director of Athletics Courtney Thomsen did not respond to messages.
As of Wednesday morning, Heimann’s profile remained on the Midland University website.
A Fremont police report attached to the court filings detail the incident, alleged to have happened in October 2023. The Tribune does not identify alleged victims of sex crimes. The alleged victim did speak to the Tribune, and she stated that the claims in Fremont Police Detective Kelly Drake’s investigative report were what she reported to police officials.
Drake wrote that the alleged victim told police she was visiting Heimann from out of state and he allegedly gave her an “excess” number of sleeping pills, causing her to fall asleep in a bed inside a Fremont residence. The alleged victim told investigators she woke up briefly and claimed Heimann gave her more sleeping pills.
The alleged victim told police that Heimann had set up his cellphone on a tripod near the bed and began to record her as she was in a state of semiconsciousness.
“(The alleged victim) said she was in and out of sleep and although she never opened her eyes, she could feel what was occurring to her body,” Drake wrote in the report.
The woman told police investigators that the day after the alleged incident, she was tired and fell asleep on a couch inside the residence and woke up to reportedly find Heimann filming her again. She told police that she confronted him about the alleged incident from the night before and that she told Heimann what he had allegedly done was a crime.
Weeks after the alleged incident, the woman told police that she and Heimann exchanged text messages in which she alleged Heimann admitted to performing the alleged unwanted sex acts upon her and filming it, but stating he had deleted the video.
Drake wrote in her report that she reviewed the text messages allegedly sent to the woman by Heimann, and confirmed the victim’s description of them.
In her report, Drake said she attempted to interview Heimann about the allegations, but his lawyer did not respond to requests for a meeting.