MIAMI — In March 2012, a mother came to the Key Biscayne Police Department with her 14-year-old daughter, who had been sent steamy love letters from a grown man — Oscar Olea, her 26-year-old gymnastics coach.

Shortly after, a second mother independently came forward, telling the then-chief of police that the same coach, Oscar Olea, had raped her 17-year-old daughter. Both moms were reluctant to get their daughters involved. And the 14-year-old denied anything sexual was going on.

Various law enforcement experts told the Miami Herald that, willing victims or not, that’s the kind of information police departments should do something about: sternly warn the coach, survey parents and students, conduct surveillance. Investigate. Key Biscayne police did none of that. Then-Chief Charles Press, upon hearing the rape allegation, didn’t even put a memo in the file.

Olea continued to coach — and push boundaries.

Students described him as flirty, making sexualized comments, supplying back rubs, handling girls in ways that made them uncomfortable, asking whether students were virgins or whether they’d had their periods, even hanging out at the beach or cruising to the mall with the students. A Facebook video shows a car stopping at an intersection while giggling girls jump out, circle the car and jump back in — a “Chinese fire drill.” Olea was driving, former students said.

Parents and supervisors at the venues where he coached took little note, although some have since said they had to warn him at times about being alone with students.

Olea’s world crashed after the Miami Herald published a story in January called “Key Biscayne’s Dark Secret,” which quoted the 14-year-old, now a married mother of three, saying she’d been serially sexually abused by the coach. She said Olea gained her trust first by acting like an older brother and later exerting a Svengali-like influence over her and others, an abusive power dynamic seen in coaching-related sex abuse scandals around the country.

Olea was arrested in late February and is now in jail awaiting trial on sex abuse charges.

Could that arrest have happened 13 years ago? It might have been challenging given the reluctance of the parents to let their girls testify, but what is striking and disturbing to law enforcement officials consulted by the Herald is that the police department did virtually nothing, leaving young girls in the hands of a man recently labeled a “likely pedophile” by a circuit court judge.

Beatriz Llorente, an attorney who was previously representing Olea, told the Herald in January that Olea “vehemently” denied the allegations against him. She stopped responding to Herald reporters after publication of the first story and is no longer serving as counsel for Olea, who is now being represented by Matthew Ladd and Charlton Stoner, according to court records. Stoner said this week that he had no comment on the allegations against his client, and Ladd did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Olea has pleaded not guilty.

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