Man convicted of unlawful sex with minor, other charges

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. (AP) - It wasn’t her first attempt at sobriety, but this time Hailey Cole vowed that things would be different. She would stay clean, get her life together.

Hailey, 19, didn’t make it.

In June 2016, days after a judge approved her release from substance abuse rehabilitation, Hailey called her mother, Stephanie Looney, from Florida Hospital Oceanside. She said she’d been hit by a car while riding her bike.

Hailey put a nurse on the line. Hailey was fine, the nurse said.

That was the last time Looney heard her daughter’s voice. When she called back to the hospital later, Hailey was gone. The nurse said she’d phoned someone else to pick her up.

Hailey died the next day, June 8, 2016, in the bed of Michael Boland, a 67-year-old career criminal. Years earlier, Looney had reported Boland to police for soliciting sex from Hailey in exchange for drugs when she was still underage.

Officials ruled Hailey’s death an overdose. Looney struggles not to drown in grief and unanswered questions.

“Why didn’t she call me?” Looney asks herself a year-and-a-half later. “Why would she call him?”

Another question also looms. Why did it take so long for law enforcement to prosecute Boland?

Boland was convicted in October of unlawful sex with a minor, contributing to the delinquency of a minor and three counts of depriving custody. Those charges involved a girl The News-Journal is identifying as “Hannah” because she is a sex crime victim.

But that conviction did not occur until Looney and others had filed at least 12 complaints about Boland to area law enforcement in four years. Records also show that Boland was on the FBI’s radar.

The News-Journal examined hundreds of pages of law enforcement investigative reports and interviewed teenage victims and their parents who question why Boland’s sex crimes continued unchecked for so long.

“What do you do other than go to the government? Kill the man?” Stephanie Looney said. “I should have.”

Stephanie Looney didn’t know about Boland’s past when he moved into her Ormond Beach neighborhood in the early 2000s.

Stephanie Looney was Stephanie Morgan back then, a young, unmarried mother with four children. She and Jim Cole had never married, but the union produced Looney’s first three daughters, the oldest one being Hailey. Hailey went to kindergarten with Boland’s adopted daughter.

Looney noticed other young girls being dropped off at Boland’s home two doors down. He was a math tutor for Volusia County schools, he told her.

Records don’t back that claim. He applied for a position in 2005, school district spokeswoman Nancy Wait said, but was disqualified after a background check. A+ Tutoring, the county’s contracted service at the time, confirmed they never employed Boland.

In fact, Boland had only recently returned to Volusia County.

In the early 1990s, Boland was extradited from Daytona Beach to his home state of Massachusetts to stand trial for a revenge-motivated arson.

He’d faced previous charges there, including indecent assault and battery on a 12-year-old, wanton property damage and battery on a social worker. None of those accusations stuck.

But then a young woman who news accounts and a police report indicate began a relationship with Boland in her early teens provided the testimony prosecutors needed to convict him of the arson. He served five years in a Massachusetts prison, and came back to Volusia County sometime after his release in 1998.

Boland also had problems when he returned to Volusia County. His name appears numerous times in police reports, mostly for pawned property, but also for battery, fraudulent business practices and passing bad checks. He served little jail time. Between 2001 and 2016, he only served 19 days in Volusia County jail, records show.

But to Looney, Boland appeared at first to be a businessman living in her Ormond Beach neighborhood. He came home at day’s end in a suit and tie. He carried a briefcase.

Katie Marshall, one of the runaways Boland was recently convicted of harboring, first met Boland through his adopted daughter in elementary school. According to a later statement to investigators, Boland’s adopted daughter was the daughter of a woman with whom Boland began a relationship when she was 15.

Boland dazzled Marshall. He was “one of those perfect father figures” who doted on his daughter and her friends, Marshall told The News-Journal.

Hailey, too, was in that group of grade school girls. Hailey was “special” to Boland, Marshall said. Hailey’s baby picture smiled down from Boland’s living room wall.

Marshall had been in Department of Children and Families custody before moving to Ormond Beach with her mother. Her dad wasn’t around, but Boland was. He had an inviting home with a pool and several pets.

His daughter often asked friends to sleep over, and Boland supplied the entertainment. He took the girls to Skate and Shake every weekend and then to his Atlantic Avenue office to surf the internet.

Marshall, now 20, lost touch with those friends when she moved to DeLand in sixth grade. That was a few years before accusations against Boland for sex with minors and child pornography began trickling in to local law enforcement agencies.

Marshall was taken from her mother and returned to foster care. She crossed paths with Boland again when she ran away from a Polk County foster home in August 2015. This time, at age 17, her childhood illusions about Boland were shattered.

Marshall now recognized Boland as a man in his mid-60s who she said made his living through theft and drug deals. Boland was an opportunist, she said.

“He’ll give you anything you want if you do what he wants,” she told The News-Journal.

To investigators, Marshall was more direct. “He likes younger girls who like - he does favors for younger girls,” she said of Boland. “In return - I don’t think he - he doesn’t - it’s not about them performing a sexual act on him, it’s him performing a sexual act on them.”

In 2011, when she was 14, Hailey came home from a shopping trip with friends sporting new clothes, manicured nails and an expensive cellphone.

Boland had bought them, she told her mother. Looney called him, irate. She had married Mike Looney by that time and moved out of Boland’s neighborhood.

Boland insisted on his right to shower his daughter’s friends with gifts and accused Looney of neglect.

“I’m not giving her $100 a day, but she has a home and a family,” Stephanie Looney shot back. She ordered him to stay away.

Hailey started running away from home. She also began using heroin and abusing prescription pills. Looney recalls the day Hailey came home at 14 and held out her arms. “Look at the track marks, Mommy,” Looney recalled Hailey saying. “I need help.”

Police records show Hailey coming to the attention of law enforcement dozens of times for various incidents beginning in 2011. The Looneys reported Hailey missing or committed her for mental health evaluations several times, police records show.

At one point when Hailey was 14, Looney said she called Ormond Beach police to report Boland’s relationship with her daughter. She said she was referred to Daytona Beach police. Looney said she took Hailey to the Daytona Beach Police Department and Hailey told officers everything about the relationship. Looney said she also called repeatedly to follow up on that visit. But Daytona Beach police told The News-Journal they do not have a record of that meeting.

Looney said she also filed an online report with the FBI and called the state Department of Children and Families. Two DCF caseworkers came to her home and one of them explained that they had been trying to catch Boland for years, Looney recalled.

On Dec. 12, 2014 - when Hailey was 17 - records show a Daytona Beach police officer accompanied DCF caseworker Lindsey Sprague to an interview with Hailey and her mother.

“It was learned that several under-aged females have been taken advantage of and given money and drugs by Mr. Boland for sex,” the report states. “It seems that the above behavior has been going on for some time, possibly years, and it is unknown how many young girls have been involved.”

The report labeled Hailey a “victim of human trafficking.”

Hailey’s friend, Lydia, recounted her own experiences with Boland to The News-Journal during an interview at the Looneys’ home and via phone and Facebook messages. The newspaper is not using her last name because investigative reports indicate she was also a victim of sexual crimes.

Lydia met Boland’s adopted daughter at Ormond Beach Middle School. During a sleepover at Boland’s house, two friends cautioned Lydia that Boland was “creepy,” she said, and told her to exit the home through a back bedroom if Boland approached her during the night.

Lydia brushed off the warning, but said she “found out the hard way” in July 2012 when Boland tried to perform oral sex on her. “I got really freaked out. I jumped up, put my clothes back on and got in the car,” she said. Lydia was 13.

Boland called her “hard-to-get Lydia” because she wouldn’t have sex with him or accept the drugs he constantly tried to push on her. Lydia said he eventually paid her to let him watch - and sometimes record - her having sex with her boyfriend.

A few days after Christmas 2012, the first official report of Boland’s abuse The News-Journal could find was made to Daytona Beach police.

Boland had accused Carlos Baez, a guest in Boland’s home, of stealing a laptop computer. No laptop was found among Baez’s belongings, and the charge was dropped. But Baez had an accusation of his own.

Baez told police Boland was a pedophile, according to Baez’s Dec. 29, 2012, arrest report. A Boland neighbor, Wayne Thompson, backed up Baez’s claim in a written statement to police.

“(Baez) said he got out (of Boland’s apartment) because Mike was having sex with little girls,” Thompson’s statement reads.

Baez, who now lives in Boston, said in a phone interview with The News-Journal that he told Daytona Beach police Boland was a drug dealer and a “prolific pedophile.”

Wayne Thompson told The News-Journal Boland was a “pervert,” and described a disturbing incident that occurred while Boland was his neighbor. Boland once paid to borrow Thompson’s SUV and returned it strewn with liquor bottles and girls’ swimsuits, Thompson said. Nervous about how his vehicle had been used, he said he cleaned it out and sold it.

The accusations against Boland intensified in the years that followed.

A 14-year-old girl reported Boland to Daytona Beach police for child pornography on Oct. 20, 2013.

A month later, two Seabreeze High School students told a Volusia deputy and Daytona Beach police names of nine girls ages 12-17 they believed Boland sexually exploited, according to a police report. The alleged victims refused to cooperate and told a Daytona detective Boland was “just a friend,” the report states. Sgt. Tim Ehrenkaufer said a search warrant was executed at Boland’s home in response to the allegation but no illegal content was found on the devices seized by law enforcement.

On Feb. 17, 2014, two girls ages 13 and 17 accused Boland of touching them inappropriately during a drive to a Taco Bell.

The 13-year-old told Volusia County investigators that on the way home from the restaurant Boland began rubbing her leg and told her “it was time for her to give back for all the money he has spent on her.” The girl said she jumped out of Boland’s vehicle and ran home. Records show Boland was charged with misdemeanor battery, but he was never prosecuted. An official said deputies investigated but determined no crime had been committed.

On May 3, 2014, Ormond Beach mother Latonia Mitchell told Volusia County deputies she found sexually explicit text messages on her 15-year-old daughter’s cellphone between the girl and Boland.

In a follow-up interview, Mitchell told deputies she believed Boland paid for the phone and its service, and turned over the phone for analysis. In addition, Mitchell told deputies the underage daughter of a neighbor had stated “that Boland has performed sexual acts upon (Mitchell’s daughter’s) friends.”

The status of Mitchell’s report was labeled “Active/Other - Continued to Sex Crimes Unit.” But Volusia County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Andrew Gant said a forensic exam of the phone revealed “nothing criminal.” He said the sheriff’s office had “very little involvement in this case” and forwarded information gathered to Daytona Beach Police.

Mitchell told The News-Journal that investigators who interviewed her were aware of Boland.

“’We know everything about him but we can’t get enough evidence to stick,’” Mitchell recalled investigators telling her.

When the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office received reports about Boland, that information was funneled to several local law enforcement agencies, Gant wrote in an email, and “the FBI did take a lead role in the investigation that developed through the Human Trafficking Task Force.”

Daytona Beach Police spokeswoman Lyda Longa did not give a reason why investigations of Boland did not result in his arrest. No one at the department was available for an interview, she said, because “our cases are still showing as open.”

In 2015 it appeared that the FBI was closing in on Boland. According to an Ormond police report, FBI Special Agent Alyson Samuels was investigating Boland for “placing teenage girls on the internet” and “using them to trade sexual favors for profit.”

Agent Samuels declined News-Journal interview requests both in person and through a media spokesperson about the FBI’s investigation of Boland. The Jacksonville FBI office offered an interview with Samuels’ supervisor, but later rescinded the offer. But records make it clear that Boland was a target of the FBI.

On March 25, 2015, Ormond Beach Police and the FBI surrounded Boland’s Grove Street home and made contact with a teenager The News-Journal is identifying as Hannah. Then 16, Hannah emerged from Boland’s home with two other teenage girls.

Hannah lived with Boland, but at the time denied they had a sexual relationship, according to State Attorney’s Office prosecutor Erica Kane. Still, on March 27, 2015, DCF removed Hannah from Boland’s residence because she was in “immediate danger,” an Ormond Beach police report states.

Though Hannah was transferred between facilities in Volusia, Flagler and Polk counties, she continued to get away from various group foster homes to see Boland.

When Hannah ran away from a Palm Coast foster care facility on July 2, 2015, a Flagler County Sheriff’s Office detective contacted the FBI’s Samuels. In a report, the detective noted that Samuels had been “working a human trafficking case on Michael Boland for a long period of time.” The Flagler sheriff’s office lacked evidence to charge Boland with a crime, and passed the case to the FBI.

Boland remained free. Reports show Hannah continued to run away from foster care placements to be with him, and Boland would pick her up when she ran away.

Charles H. Rose III, professor of excellence in trial advocacy at Stetson University College of Law, said although Boland was on law enforcement’s radar, such cases sometimes take years before the right evidence falls into place.

Offenders like Boland “prey on young women and boys who don’t have a lot of credibility in the eyes of the system,” said Rose, who has no connection to Boland’s case. “They pick victims carefully, knowing that type is less likely to be believed.”

Rose’s pre-Stetson career includes experience as both a prosecutor of sex crimes and a defense attorney for accused predators. “As a prosecutor, if I go forward too soon without enough evidence, I may never get this guy,” Rose said.

“He’s a predator and I just caught him,” Hailey Cole’s father, Jim Cole, told a 9-1-1 dispatcher in the early hours of Aug. 16, 2015.

“My daughter’s in trouble,” Jim Cole continued, minutes after an altercation with Boland outside an Ormond Beach motel. “She ran to him, we confronted him and he ran my wife over in his car.”

Jim Cole grew up in Daytona Beach and had been in an on-and-off relationship with Hailey’s mother, Stephanie Looney, in the late 1990s.

Their relationship ended permanently while their first daughter, Hailey, was still in grade school. Jim Cole moved out of state in 2010 and lost contact with his daughters.

Hailey once visited her father and his wife, Susie, in Indiana in late 2014. Jim Cole found out Hailey had violated her probation. He turned her over to Indiana authorities on Christmas day.

“I was just trying to get her on the right path again,” he said in a recent interview with The News-Journal. “The last thing I saw from my daughter was her flipping me off in handcuffs.”

Hailey also began going through drug withdrawal during the visit. She told Jim Cole about her relationship with Boland and that she had reported him to law enforcement.

“It made me want to come down here and take care of it,” Jim Cole said. “I was an angry, angry man.”

Hailey was admitted to a Department of Juvenile Justice drug rehabilitation facility in the Florida Panhandle. There, Hailey disclosed details of her sexual relationship with Boland to the FBI in 2015, both Jim Cole and Stephanie Looney said.

Looney said an FBI agent told her Hailey had been “very forthcoming” during the interview. But Hailey was growing weary of talking about her trauma.

Looney said Hailey called her after the FBI interview. “Please don’t make me do (these interviews) anymore,” Hailey pleaded.

Jim and Susie Cole moved to Volusia County from Indiana to offer support before Hailey’s July 2015 release from drug rehab.

Hailey appeared to flourish for about a month, Jim Cole told The News-Journal. Then she broke her curfew and disappeared for three days.

Jim Cole suspected Hailey was back on drugs. Her friends said she might be at a low-end motel with Boland.

The Coles scoured motels on State Road A1A and U.S. 1 until they found Boland’s car outside Ormond Beach’s Scottish Inn in the early morning hours of Aug. 16, 2015. Motel guests directed them to Boland’s door.

Hailey wasn’t in Boland’s room, but two 17-year-olds were - Marshall, who had met Boland as a young girl, and Hannah.

Boland had picked them up near a Polk County foster care facility. He drove them to his home and then shifted them between Volusia County motels for a week, according to investigative reports.

Jim Cole, an imposing figure at 6-foot-7, demanded to see his daughter - who actually wasn’t at the motel. Boland later testified at his trial that he feared for his life.

“I am terrifying,” Jim Cole told The News-Journal. “If you just had sex with my daughter for the last four years and now you just got confronted by the guy that’s her dad, I’d be a little horrified too.”

Boland rushed Marshall and Hannah to his car, but Susie Cole stood guard in front, blocking his escape. Boland lurched forward anyway, clipping Susie Cole with his car, and sped away, an arrest report states. Jim Cole gave chase, narrating his pursuit to a 9-1-1 dispatcher until Boland ran a stop sign and crashed in a shower of sparks in Flagler County.

Deputies were on the scene in moments. They discovered Boland’s passengers had been reported missing and arrested him for aggravated battery against Susie Cole.

When questioned, Marshall “disclosed that (Boland) had ’sold’ (Hannah) to multiple partners for drugs while at an unknown party” and that she had observed Boland and Hannah having sex, according to Ormond Beach police reports. The case was turned over to the FBI’s Samuels.

The next day a Flagler County judge approved Boland’s release on a $10,000 bail with two conditions: He was to have no contact with Susie Cole, the two underage passengers in his vehicle or anyone in their respective families. And he was to have no contact with any minors.

Stephanie Looney, worried by news Boland had posted bail, sent Hailey a Facebook message on Sept. 4, 2015, filled with texting shorthand: “Boland’s out of jail, be careful. Listen to me for once.

“Do not contact him. He is still under FBI watch and will end up doing life in jail. You are a key witness so lay low and trust no one in his circle.”

Mike and Stephanie Looney again committed Hailey involuntarily to a substance abuse treatment program in spring 2016. With their permission, she was eligible for release in early June of that year.

Stephanie Looney struggles with extreme social anxiety and rarely ventures from home. So on the day in early June 2016 when a judge was to determine whether Hailey’s latest stint in rehabilitation was complete, Mike Looney went to S. James Foxman Justice Center in Daytona Beach.

As Mike Looney entered the courthouse, Hailey ran down the stairs from the second floor and launched herself into his arms.

“Please tell the judge I’m ready to come home,” Mike Looney recalls Hailey begging. “I don’t want to go back to rehab.”

When the judge asked for his input, the stepfather consented to Hailey’s release.

“I feel like if I would have spoke up …,” Mike Looney said in a recent interview at the couple’s home. He stops, his voice shackled by emotion.

“He’s holding that,” Stephanie Looney fills in. Sympathy and resentment battle behind her eyes. “Sometimes I blame him. Sometimes I don’t.”

A court order wasn’t enough to keep Boland away from Hailey. She called him from an area hospital on June 7, 2016, after being knocked from her bike by a passing car.

Boland stowed Hailey’s bike in the trunk of his car, took a selfie with her in the front seat and drove her to his South Daytona apartment. Boland violated the terms of his release simply by picking up Hailey from the hospital.

Amelia, an 18-year-old woman who told detectives she was one of 30 girls who had been sexually exploited by Boland while underage, recounted Hailey’s final hours for South Daytona police. The News-Journal is using an alias because Amelia is a sex crime victim.

Boland knew Hailey had recently finished substance abuse treatment, Amelia said. Yet he tempted Hailey with prescription pills, rattling the bottle in front of her face when she resisted. Hailey also had been drinking, Amelia said, and that weakened her resolve.

Boland shot a liquefied combination of Roxicodone, Xanax and Dilaudid into Hailey’s veins about three times during the evening, Amelia told police in a videotaped statement. Then, Hailey took the needle and continued. Sometime after midnight on June 8, 2016, Hailey and Boland went to bed together.

At 6 a.m. that morning, Amelia - who stayed at Boland’s house that night - peered into Boland’s bedroom before she left for work. She saw Boland and Hailey in bed and apparently asleep, she told police.

Nearly 14 hours later - at 7:48 p.m. - Boland dialed 9-1-1: “I have a dead young lady in my bed,” he said to the dispatcher. “I just know she’s dead because she’s cold and stiff.”

Authorities found Hailey half clothed in the middle of the bed. “She’s been in that same spot all day. We just thought she was sleeping,” Boland said.

An autopsy report states the cause of death was a drug overdose.

After 9 p.m. three Volusia County deputies rang the Looneys’ doorbell. All the children were away and Mike and Stephanie Looney were enjoying a rare night alone.

They asked Mike Looney to step outside, but sent Stephanie Looney back in.

“My legs turned to rubber and I went down on the floor,” Stephanie Looney said. Sensing tragedy, she mustered the strength to join her husband. That’s when she noticed a man in plain clothes wearing a chaplain’s badge.

“Is it one of my kids?” she asked a female deputy.

“Yes ma’am, it is,” the deputy replied.

“Call the ambulance, paramedics, everything before you tell me which one, because I’m gonna die,” Stephanie Looney said. When she regained her composure, they delivered the news that Hailey was dead.

Stephanie Looney dialed her family members and passed her phone to the chaplain. “We just couldn’t do it. It was the worst night of my life,” she told The News-Journal a year later. “It still feels like yesterday.”

Hailey’s purse and personal items - minus her cellphone, which was never found - were deposited at the South Daytona police station, but her mother couldn’t gather the nerve to retrieve them. “I can’t accept that she’s gone,” she said.

A ring of stones marks Hailey’s small, flower-filled plot at Hillside Cemetery on the east bank of the Halifax River. Two lengths of PVC pipe rise from among the flowers. On one is a green umbrella bearing a cartoon frog’s face. Atop the other is a photo of Hailey with the inscription “free spirit.”

Hailey’s body isn’t there - Stephanie Looney had her cremated - and her family is still saving up for a headstone.

South Daytona police questioned Boland and his associates but determined they had insufficient evidence to charge him with Hailey’s death, Lt. Mark Cheatham told The News-Journal.

On April 6, 2017, the case was officially closed. “All leads and available information in this case have been exhausted and it is unwarranted to continue this investigation,” a report states.

“We would have to be able to prove she died from a specific drug that he gave her and have a witness,” said Cheatham. Because Hailey had several substances in her system, “there’s no way to prove which drug actually killed her.”

South Daytona Chief Ron Wright said that on the day Hailey died his department “didn’t have an inclination of any suspicious activity going on.” A month later, he said, State Attorney’s Office and FBI investigators met with him about the case they were building against Boland.

“If (Boland) was seen with young girls, they wanted us to (let them know),” Cheatham said.

Boland was prohibited by court order from contact with Hailey and two others present in his home near the time of her death - Hannah’s mother and brother. Violation of such orders is not a crime in itself, but is grounds for revocation of bond.

South Daytona officers entered Boland’s residence again on July 17, 2016. Boland was arrested for violating an injunction for protection of Hannah, who was living in his house. But he was released when the injunction was dropped. However, Boland still was in violation of the court order. Hannah, her mother, brother and a 3-year-old relative plus two underage girls were present with Boland when the police arrived that day.

And there’s this: Amelia - the woman who recounted Hailey’s final hours to police - also told them that the day after Hailey’s death, she had seen a text message from Boland that read: “Hailey died in my arms this morning.”

If so, why did Boland wait until the evening of June 8, 2016, to call 9-1-1 to report Hailey’s death? It’s a question that remains unanswered.

On July 25, 2016, South Daytona officers again were called to Boland’s home in search of a burglary suspect. Hannah, her mother and a 15-year-old all were recorded in the home by a police body camera and noted in an incident report. Again, that would have violated the court order he agreed to when he was allowed to bond out of jail nearly a year earlier.

But Chief Wright said Orders of No Contact are not visible in the system his officers use to check a suspect’s criminal history.

“If it’s not in the computer, how can we know about it?” Wright said.

State Attorney R.J. Larizza said Boland first came on prosecutors’ radar when he was arrested for aggravated battery against Susie Cole in August 2015.

As investigators compiled evidence for that case, they realized there was “more to it than some guy leaving the scene and maybe striking somebody with a car,” Larizza said. “That’s when the red flags started going up.”

The case was handed over to experienced prosecutor Erica Kane in the Sex Crimes/Career Criminal Unit.

“When we got this case we took the bull by the horns and thoroughly scrutinized this guy,” said Larizza. “I can’t speak to what happened before it got on our radar screen.”

Boland was arrested in August 2016 for violation of his pretrial release, harboring a group home runaway and child abuse. Kane filed a successful motion to revoke Boland’s bond.

Soon, Kane said, girls who previously had denied involvement with Boland began to open up.

The girls’ firsthand accounts of their interactions with Boland provided the crucial evidence needed to charge Boland with several counts of sex with Hannah and for taking Hannah, Katie Marshall and a 14-year-old from a Winter Haven foster care facility.

The girls were nervous about admitting that they initially gave false statements to law enforcement regarding their relationship with Boland, and that they had been abusing drugs and alcohol.

Kane assured them she was “not trying to prove that they’re liars to charge them for those things,” she said. “The person we are after is the person who did bad things to them.”

Hannah disclosed that Boland had initiated a sexual relationship with her at age 15 and demanded sex from her “hundreds of times” in exchange for money, illegal contraband, room and board, food and electronics, an investigative report states.This past October, Boland was brought to trial. On Oct. 13, he was convicted of unlawful sex with a minor, contributing to the delinquency of a minor and three counts of depriving custody. The unlawful sex involved Hannah.

The aggravated battery charge against Boland for hitting Susie Cole with his car was dismissed, and a jury found Boland not guilty of leaving the scene of an accident with injury.

The week after he was found guilty, Circuit Judge Leah Case sentenced Boland to 30 consecutive years in prison. She said Boland “used his position in society to manipulate the most vulnerable people because of their economic or addiction issues. It was a calculated decision on his part and he did it over and over again.”

On Nov. 7, Boland pleaded no contest to an additional count of unlawful sex with Hannah and two more counts of depriving custody. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison, to be served concurrently with his 30-year sentence.

Spokeswoman Shannon Peters said the State Attorney’s Office also investigated accusations against Boland beyond the crimes for which he was found guilty. No additional charges were filed because the alleged victims contacted by her office either declined to disclose details of those accusations or chose not to participate in the court process, Peters said.

The State Attorney’s Office is bound by law to protect the identity of potential victims of sex crimes. But two now-19-year-old women told The News-Journal they were contacted by the office’s investigators. Both said they wanted to come forward in the wake of Hailey’s death, but then changed their minds.

One of those women summarized her relationship with Boland in a series of Facebook messages with The News-Journal.

“He gave me food, rented me a room, got me a phone, nails were done, hair was nice,” she wrote. “Of course, I was strung out on (Roxicodone) and dope though.”

Still, she thought Boland was a good person.

“I loved and trusted Mike,” she said. “He did a lot for all us girls, and only wanted one thing in return from us. I knew he would get mean when he didn’t get what he wanted - us - but I never thought it would have got as far as it did with Hailey.”

Another woman, Hailey’s longtime friend Lydia, said she asked to be identified by her real first name as a message to Boland “that I’m speaking out just like Hailey did. I want, like, the other girls that were involved to know that they shouldn’t be afraid to, like, speak up and tell what happened and all.”

But Lydia now has a 2-year-old daughter. Boland still scares her.

Katie Marshall also told investigators of a conversation Boland had with her after Hailey died.

Boland, she said, asked if she was being a “good girl,” and said Hailey had been a “bad girl.” Marshall said Boland then told her he had given Hailey a “hot shot.” When an investigator asked what that meant to her, Marshall replied, “A hotshot is either a bad bag of drugs - I don’t know which drugs it would be - or too much, like over the amount.”

Marshall also told investigators that Boland “physically threatened my life,” and told her no one would ever find her body.

Boland won’t be eligible for parole until December 2042, at age 94.

Jim Cole, Hailey’s father, has set his sights on the future. If Boland steps outside the prison gates, he said, “I’ll still be waiting for him.”

Stephanie Looney, Hailey’s mother, imagines how her life - and Hailey’s - might have gone if she took matters into her own hands rather than relying on law enforcement. If she had confronted Boland with a gun instead of words and killed him.

“I didn’t think I had to go down that road, but now I wish I would have,” Stephanie Looney said. “He’d be gone, (Hailey) would be here and I’d be in jail. But the right people would be alive.”

The day after Boland was sentenced, Mike Looney finally picked up Hailey’s effects from the South Daytona Police Department.

“I cherish everything of hers now,” Stephanie Looney said. “It’s all I have - memories, photos, clothes and some ashes.”

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Information from: Daytona Beach (Fla.) News-Journal, http://www.news-journalonline.com