Sixth man comes forward to allege abuse by former Capital Christian School teacher

Zach Steele says he is “victim number one” of Dave Arnold, the former Capital Christian School teacher accused of tying up five of his students in his apartment 40 years ago for his own sexual gratification.

Before those students were allegedly bound inside Arnold’s Sacramento apartment, Steele, a 60-year-old retired Auburn businessman, said Arnold did the same thing to him while Arnold ran a youth group in the 1970s at Sacramento’s Arden Church of the Nazarene, where Steele’s father was the head pastor.

“He would invite me over to his apartment,” Steele said in an interview. “I didn’t think anything of it. And then he came to me one day and he said, ‘Hey, you want to play a game?’

“And I go, ‘What’s the game?’ He goes, ‘Well, I call it hostage. ... I tie you up and I’ll pay you $10 if you can get out of the tie-up.’”

The “game” continued through the summer of 1979, when Steele was a high school junior and Arnold tied him up more than 10 times as the process became increasingly disturbing, Steele said.

“It escalated to more and more times...” Steele said. “And he goes, ‘I’ve got a new move for you.’ So the new move was tying my hands behind my back, tying my feet, you know, with the bandages to a four-legged stool and try to get out. ...

“And then he would say, ‘Hey, let’s try another thing. I’m going to blindfold you and gag you.’”

Steele’s description of events matches those contained in a lawsuit filed in Sacramento Superior Court in April against Arnold and Capital Christian on behalf of five former students of Arnold’s. Southern California attorneys Brian Williams and Mike Reck filed the suit under the Child Victims Act, a California law that allows people who were sexually abused as children to sue.

Arnold has not responded to multiple requests for comment. He had been working as an associate professor at Indiana Wesleyan University’s online school for adult and professional learners until The Sacramento Bee began making inquiries about him last month.

“Indiana Wesleyan University (IWU) no longer employs Dr. David Arnold,” the school’s vice president for external affairs, Tod Dalberg, wrote in an email after The Bee’s story on the lawsuit was published. “He was employed by IWU-National & Global, our adult learning/online program. He was employed at IWU from 2003 to Spring 2022.

“Due to university policy, I am unable to share any additional information beyond his employment dates at Indiana Wesleyan University.”

Rick Cole, the Capital Christian pastor who took over in 1995 from his father, Glen Cole, said he knew nothing about the allegations before the suit was filed. He said he became “nauseous” reading the allegations in the 30-page lawsuit of a cover-up at the school where Arnold was a teacher from 1980 to 1983.

Jim Dorsey, lead pastor at the Arden Nazarene Church, said he knew nothing about the allegations or the individuals allegedly involved.

“This is way before my time,” Dorsey said. “I don’t know the details on this and I don’t know the people involved.”

‘I broke down’

Steele came forward after reading in The Bee earlier this month about the Capital Christian lawsuit, which seeks damages for negligence, sexual harassment and sexual battery from the school and Arnold.

“I broke down,” Steele said. “I was emotionally upset... This has been going on for 40 years and nobody’s done anything about it.”

Steele is now represented by Williams and Reck, who have not yet filed a lawsuit on his behalf.

“It took a tremendous amount of courage for Zach to come forward and share his experiences with the goal of supporting others who were subjected to similar misconduct,” Williams said. “As his lawyers, we intend to hold Mr. Arnold and the responsible institutions accountable for their misconduct.”

Steele said reading the descriptions of other young men who say they also were bound by Arnold in his apartment brought back memories of what happened to him and made him question why he hadn’t resisted as a youth.

“Why, why, why, why would I do this?” he said. “And it was like an epiphany or just a light bulb that said, this is why, because the guy that you trusted, the guy that was your mentor, the guy that was an authority over you totally betrayed you.”

Steele said he first met Arnold in Bethany, Okla., in 1976 when Arnold was his football coach and history teacher at a local school.

Toward the end of his freshman year, Steele’s father, Herbert, was hired as head pastor at Sacramento’s Arden Church of the Nazarene. Steele wanted to finish out his freshman year while his parents moved, so he stayed with family friends in Bethany for a few weeks until they left for a vacation.

“And so I ended up taking up Dave Arnold on an invitation to stay at his house, his apartment,” Steele said.

Nothing unusual happened there, he said, and Arnold talked at times about the possibility of becoming a youth pastor at the Sacramento church.

Arnold began as youth pastor in 1977

Steele moved to Sacramento in June 1977, and by the next fall Arnold had moved also to become youth pastor at the church for a group of about 20 teenagers, Steele said.

“He became my confidante,” Steele said, recalling that he could talk to Arnold about family issues or problems with his girlfriend.

Arnold began inviting him to his Bell Avenue apartment for “the game,” he said.

At first, it seemed like a harmless way to make $10, Steele said, and after he escaped his bindings the two would frequently go out to lunch together.

But the sessions began to escalate, with blindfolds and socks used as gags, Steele said.

The last time, Steele said, Arnold tied him up tightly, turned the TV on with the volume blasting and told him he was leaving for a while.

“It felt like an hour,” he said. “It was probably only 25 minutes, but it felt like an hour because I started panicking. I was like, what happens while he’s gone if he gets in a car accident and I’m in his apartment tied up and nobody knows where I’m at?

“And my parents don’t know and they come and find me somehow and then they see me tied up? And so I’m panicking. All these things are going through my mind and I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, this could be really bad for my dad. It could be really bad for the church.’”

Finally, Arnold reappeared and untied his ankles and loosened the bindings on his wrists behind his back, but left the blindfold on, Steele said.

“And then he said to me, ‘Get the rest yourself, I’ve got to go pee,’” Steele said.

“And I pulled the blindfold down and I happened to look over and I saw him going down the hallway in his underwear and a T-shirt,” Steele said. “I kind of yelled at him. I go, ‘What are you doing in your underwear?’”

Steele said that “weirded me out” and he knew he could not continue.

“I was like, that’s it, I ain’t doing this no more,” Steele said. “This doesn’t feel good, right?

“Well, I couldn’t say anything to my mom and dad. I couldn’t say anything because it would damage the church. I couldn’t say anything because what if he was just playing a game and it was innocent?”

‘Kids being tied up at school’

Steele said he avoided Arnold after that, but that during his senior year in high school Arnold continued to show up at his football and basketball games uninvited.

By 1983, Arnold was teaching at Capital Christian along with Steele’s mother, Alda, who was a music and English teacher there, when his mother came home and told him there was a problem, he said.

“Dave’s in trouble,” Steele remembers his mother saying. “Pastor Dave’s in trouble and there are some kids being tied up at school.”

The lawsuit says Arnold left the school after a student told a vice principal in the winter of the 1982-83 school year that Arnold had brought him to his apartment to help grade papers and had tied him up, blindfolded him and pulled his pants down as part of what Arnold called a “game.”

The suit also says Arnold reassured one of his students that the “game” was not unusual, that he had tied up members of the church youth group, as well.

The vice principal told Pastor Glen Cole about the allegations but Cole, who died in 2012, refused to go to authorities and covered it up, the lawsuit says.

“Nobody is going to bring down my school,” the lawsuit quotes Cole as saying. “Not Arnold, not those boys, not anyone.”

After the claims came to light at Capital Christian, Steele said, Arnold had to leave his post as youth pastor.

“Obviously, he had to resign from the church, as well,” he said. “My dad was like, ‘Hey, you’ve got something going on, some scandal, we can’t have that.”

Are there other victims?

Steele said his parents, who have both since died, never asked him if he had been tied up by Arnold.

“It’s like a cesspool of cover up, slide it under the rug, don’t take care of the kids, let’s protect the church,” he said.

Steele said he now wonders if some problems he has had in life with two failed marriages, anger and a dislike of authority stem from what happened to him 40 years ago. And he said he worries about whether other members of the youth group had similar experiences with Arnold.

“I don’t want there to be other victims in my youth group,” he said. “I don’t. But if they know something that corroborates his behavior and if in fact that they were abused that way, I need them to come out and help themselves.

“Because I guarantee you that they’ve some type of issues their entire life from this kind of abuse, if that happened to them, because I know that I did.”

Steele said that some time after Facebook began in 2004 he received a friend request from Arnold.

“I have no desire to be friends with him, but my instincts told me, you need to keep your tabs on this guy,” Steele said.

At one point, Steele said, he saw from the page that Arnold had gotten a dog.

“He named his dog Zach,” he said.

The Facebook profile, which had been accessible before The Bee first reported on the lawsuit, is no longer available.

This story was originally published May 25, 2022 at 5:00 AM.