Charlotte skatepark mentor spent decades abusing young skaters, records say
A Charlotte pro-skateboarder once celebrated for impressing and inspiring young skaters was sentenced to more than 100 years in prison for sexually abusing the children he met at the Charlotte skateparks he helped found.
Ten men testified about Wayne “Ray” Goff’s repeated abuse — which stretched from the early 1990s to the mid 2010s — during trial last month. During that time span, Goff was in at least seven now-eerie Charlotte Observer articles.
At least a dozen boys say they were assaulted by Goff when they were 8 to 16 years old, according to court documents. He met all of them through skating, and he invited most of them to his home or chaperoned them at skateboarding competitions, according to a news release from Mecklenburg District Attorney Spencer Merriweather.
There, he would assault the boys while they slept.
From 1992 to 2014, the boys’ stories stayed the same. They would wake up with their pants undone and see Goff next to them, touching his penis or theirs.
Superior Judge Craig Collins on Friday sentenced Goff to 116 years in prison for second-degree forcible sex offense, three counts of statutory sex offense with a minor and fourteen counts of taking indecent liberties with a child. A jury found him guilty of all charges after a three-week trial last month.
“The strength these survivors have shown has truly saved other boys from future harm,” Assistant District Attorneys Katie Atwood and Terra Varnes said in a news release.
One of Goff’s victims died before trial. After one reported Goff, more came forward, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department said in a news release. Ten of them testified in front of a jury about their experiences with the now-56-year-old.
“To any survivor still carrying their burden in silence—know that we are here, we will listen, and we will fight for you,” CMPD Chief Estella Patterson said in a statement.
Goff sprouted into the Charlotte skate scene as a 27-year-old in 1995. He was from Columbia, according to archives, and Mecklenburg County park leaders had tapped him to help develop a skate park at the Methodist Home Recreation Center off Shamrock Drive.
In 1997, he was competing around the Southeast with sponsorships from several companies.
Over the years, Observer reporters wrote that Goff’s tricks and routes through the skate park captured younger skater’s attention. They would stay pinned to the side walls in awe as Goff soared through the air. He once described skating as “like having a second heart … to keep you going.”
In 2004 — his last time appearing in the paper before his 2022 arrest — a blurb on Charlotte’s top skaters read:
“Always chatting. Shares his passion with new skaters.”
