Mission Details
Target: David Wineinger
Theater: Coweta, OK
Operation: SCHOOL ZONE
Description: Release of body cam footage showing aggressive reaction to questioning regarding student safety.
Disposition: STRIPPED OF RANK — Suspended.
There is a particular kind of silence that settles over a small town when the people trusted to protect its children are the ones who need to be questioned. Coweta, Oklahoma sits quietly southeast of Tulsa, a community where parents drop their kids off at school each morning with the reasonable expectation that those children will be safe, seen, and shielded from harm. What Guerrilla News uncovered inside the walls of Coweta Junior High School is the kind of story that makes that expectation feel naive, even cruel.
Multiple students, boys and girls across grade levels, came forward with allegations of assault, harassment, and sexual molestation. A seventh-grade girl says she was held down and violated beneath a lunchroom table while a coach allegedly stood nearby and did nothing. A fourth-grade boy says he was attacked after defending a younger friend from an older football player. At least six junior high boys say they were sexually violated during PE class, in what should have been a supervised, structured school environment. And according to parents who spoke directly to our correspondent, every time they brought complaints to the administration, the response was silence, dismissal, or worse, the kind of shrug that gets dressed up in the phrase "boys will be boys."
The Man in the Middle
That phrase, "boys will be boys," belongs to David Wineinger, then-principal of Coweta Junior High School. Parents say it was his default response to allegations that should have triggered mandatory reporting, disciplinary action, and intervention. Instead, investigations reportedly went nowhere. No staff members were fired. No substantive safety protocols were implemented. The children, meanwhile, kept showing up to school.
When Guerrilla News correspondent Ron Durban arrived at Donald S. Lo Middle School in Coweta to ask Wineinger directly about these failures, he did not find a contrite administrator ready to answer hard questions. What he found instead became one of the most striking moments of civil rights inquiry we have captured on camera.
Durban walked into the school's front office and asked to speak with the principal. Staff relayed the message. Wineinger appeared. And almost immediately, the atmosphere shifted. Rather than engage with the correspondent's questions about why parents were never notified of incidents, why perpetrators faced no real consequences, and where the district's safety plan actually was, Wineinger attempted to redirect, deflect, and ultimately flee. When pressed about specific allegations, including a recorded conversation in which he admitted to throwing his keys against a wall in frustration during a prior incident involving a student being molested, the principal faltered. His legs gave out. David Wineinger, principal, collapsed.
"The Principal Plop" and What Came After
What followed the collapse was, in some ways, more disturbing than the fall itself. While receiving medical attention on the floor of his own school, Wineinger reportedly told officers on scene that he needed twenty minutes and then he would go outside and physically fight the correspondent. That statement, captured on police body camera footage obtained through open records requests, says everything about the character of a man entrusted with the daily safety of hundreds of children. He was not thinking about the students whose parents had been calling his office in tears. He was thinking about a fistfight.
He also made statements to officers indicating that he knew which parents had reported the abuse, and that it would be, in his words, very hard for him to be nice to those parents and those children going forward. That is not a slip of the tongue. That is a threat. A sitting school principal, in the immediate aftermath of collapsing under basic accountability questioning, was describing plans for retribution against the families who dared to speak up for their kids.
Durban was detained that day after the school called 911 and told dispatchers that the correspondent had physically knocked out the principal. That was the allegation that went out over police radio, prompting officers to respond with urgency. It was a lie. The body camera footage tells a completely different story, one where Wineinger's collapse was caused entirely by the psychological pressure of being asked to answer for his own conduct. Coweta Police Chief Bell arrived on scene, reviewed the situation, and had Durban released from handcuffs quickly. The chief, by all accounts in the footage and follow-up communications, conducted himself with professionalism throughout.
The Gym Under Construction and the Children Left Unsupervised
One of the most critical structural failures uncovered during this investigation centers on a period when the school's gymnasium was under renovation. With no indoor space available, PE classes were moved outside. According to multiple students, teachers, and support staff who contacted Guerrilla News independently in the days following the initial report, what happened during that outdoor PE time was not supervised instruction. It was free play with no meaningful adult oversight.
Staff members described being unable to reach PE teachers during class periods because those teachers were occupied with their phones or otherwise disengaged. An assistant principal reportedly conducted a formal observation and reported that structured activities were taking place. Former educators who spoke at a subsequent parent meeting in a Coweta public library pointed out the fundamental flaw in that assessment: children behave differently when they know they are being watched. The moment that administrator turned and walked back inside, the supervision disappeared entirely. And in that gap, in that unmonitored stretch of time on a school field, children were allegedly being sexually violated by other students while adults responsible for their safety were somewhere else entirely.
A Schoolhouse of Horrors and a Pattern Across Oklahoma
The parent meeting held at the Coweta public library drew a room full of strangers united by the same devastating experience. Mothers and fathers who had individually approached the school, filed complaints, and been turned away now sat together for the first time and realized the scope of what had been hidden from them. The stories were not isolated. They were not rumors. According to Durban, who addressed the crowd directly and visibly struggled to hold his composure, the volume of abuse reported to him in a 48-hour window was the most heartbreaking thing he had encountered in years of accountability reporting.
What makes this story hit harder than most is the context around it. In the same week that Coweta parents were filling a library meeting room, similar reports were emerging from Sallisaw schools, Central schools, and Muscogee schools. In Stillwater, a student found guilty of raping multiple girls received probation. Across Oklahoma, a pattern was becoming impossible to ignore: school administrators were covering for abusers, dismissing victims, and treating transparency as an inconvenience rather than an obligation.
Durban, a former educator himself, addressed that pattern directly. He noted that in his years of teaching eighth and twelfth graders, he watched a system fail children not because of individual bad actors alone, but because of a structural rot at the administrative level, a culture where supervisors supervise other supervisors and no one is actually watching the kids. Coweta's district, he noted, employed three superintendents and layers of administrators, and still, scores of children were allegedly abused over multiple years without a single meaningful consequence for the adults responsible for their safety.
Stripped of Rank: What Accountability Looks Like
After Durban released police body camera clips through social media throughout the following Friday, releasing new footage every two hours throughout the day, the Coweta school district acted. David Wineinger was suspended. The suspension came with pay, which is its own commentary on how institutions protect their own even in the face of overwhelming evidence of failure, but it was a beginning.
A school board meeting was scheduled for November 10th, where parents, community members, and advocates were invited to address the full scope of what had happened in Coweta's schools. Wineinger's suspension was the opening move in what Guerrilla News intends to follow until every student who was failed by his administration receives the accountability they deserve.
The children of Coweta are not abstractions. They are a seventh-grade girl who sat in a lunchroom and was not protected. They are a fourth-grade boy who tried to stand up for a friend and was punished for it. They are six junior high boys who went to PE class and came home carrying something no child should ever have to carry. They had names before any of this happened. They had futures. They deserved a principal who would fight for them instead of collapsing when asked to answer for them.
David Wineinger is no longer in that building. The fight for the children of Coweta is not over.
If you have information about misconduct in Oklahoma schools, contact Guerrilla News through our website. If you believe a child is in immediate danger, call 911. To report child abuse in Oklahoma, contact the DHS Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-522-3511. Subscribe to our channel and follow us on social media so you never miss a mission.
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