A karate instructor was sentenced to 15 years in prison Friday after two of his students, including one from over 20 years ago, accused him of sexually assaulting them during lessons at his home in Hanover.
Harry Craig Conaway, 72, faced 28 criminal charges when he was arrested in July. During a February hearing before Anne Arundel Circuit Judge Stacy McCormack, he pleaded guilty to one third-degree sex offense.
The sentence included five years of supervised probation, court records show. Conaway was barred from returning to his Hanover home, where the dojo was established and operated, and will be monitored by a team of parole agents and sexual offender treatment providers during his probation.
Additionally, Conaway will be placed on a lifetime sex offender registry, according to the Anne Arundel County State’s Attorney’s Office.
“As an instructor of martial arts, the defendant was expected to instill confidence and teach self-defense,” Anne Arundel State’s Attorney Anne Colt Leitess said in a statement. “As it turned out, the students needed defense against their own teacher who groomed and engaged them in sexual acts.”
The initial accusations against Conaway came from a 10-year-old boy who described nine months of abuse to authorities.
The abuse described in charging documents took place across several weekends between August 2022 and May 2023, as the student visited his biological father, Conaway’s neighbor. No other students or adults were present during the two-hour lessons, police wrote.
The 10-year-old boy accused his instructor of watching him shower, forcing him to take capsules that made him sleepy and measuring his genitalia. At one point, the boy said, Conaway made a silicone mold of his penis, according to charging documents.
The last recorded incident took place last May, when Conaway, who had told the boy to practice while he was away for the weekend, lured the student into the dojo and grabbed him. The boy was able to escape and run home.
Though police said at the time of Conaway’s arrest that there was no evidence to suggest there were other victims, Leitess commended the young victim’s courage, saying his account “empowered” a second man to come forward with his own experiences.
The second person was a teenager who trained at Conaway’s dojo on the weekends he visited a relative’s home nearby. He told authorities Conaway would massage him, leading to sexual acts. The abuse took place from 2001 to 2003, when the victim was between ages 13 and 15, the state’s attorney’s office said.
When the second man heard Conaway had attacked another boy, he approached law enforcement with his story.
Assistant State’s Attorney Anastasia Prigge prosecuted the state’s case against Conaway.
Mark Sobel, Conaway’s attorney, described the case as “sad and complicated for everyone involved.”
“We hope with the case coming to a conclusion that all parties can begin the healing process,” he said.
