A Lubbock County prosecutor argued Monday that a 41-year-old former youth pastor was a sexually violent man who preyed on teenage girls for years and was a danger to the community.

Luke Cunningham, who was been held at the Lubbock County Detention Center since his June 20 arrest at his home in the 1400 block of 15th Street in Shallowater, appeared in the 140th District Court with his attorney, Michael King, to ask the court to reduce his bond from its current amount of $500,000 to $100,000.

“This is a significant amount,” King told the court of the proposed bond amount.

The only piece of evidence King submitted during the bond reduction hearing is an affidavit signed by Cunningham’s wife stating they could only afford a $100,000 bond.

King also asked the court to modify a condition of Cunningham’s potential release on bond to allow him unsupervised contact with his own children.

He said a CPS investigation in Hood County was closed after investigators found no allegations that Cunningham abused his own children.

Cunningham was arrested on separate charges of sexual assault of a child and aggravated sexual assault of a child.

The first charge accuses him of sexually assaulting a teenager about Jan. 8, 2017. The second charge accuses him of raping a different teenager on Oct. 17, 2018 during which he used his hands as deadly weapons. He also faces a second count of indecency with a child by sexual contact for touching the girl’s genitals on Jan. 1, 2016.

“This sexual abuse of children is extensive,” prosecutor Cassie Graham told the court. “He is clearly a danger to society.” Testimony from a police detective during Monday’s hearing indicated the Lubbock Police Department had been investigating Cunningham for allegations of sexual misconduct since 2021.

Det. Justin Ryan Wood with the Lubbock Police Department’s Crimes Against Children Unit told the court that the investigation into Cunningham, who also works as a realtor, began after one of the girls reported the abuse to police after learning he still worked in church ministry.

Wood said the girl’s parents learned of the abuse in 2019 when Cunningham worked at Turning Point Community Church as a youth pastor. He said the girl’s parents confronted Cunningham and agreed not to report him to the police if he left ministry.

Instead, Cunningham and his family moved to Granbury where he worked as a youth pastor at Lakeside Baptist Church.

However, Cunningham’s history of sexual misconduct with teenagers was revealed during a sexual abuse prevention training at the church.

Wood said Cunningham reportedly confided with another pastor to a “level of abuse to a teenager in Lubbock.”

Church officials further investigated Cunningham and reached out to another teenager from Turning Point who also made an outcry that Cunningham sexually abused her in Lubbock.

Included in the evidence prosecutors provided to the court during the hearing were police reports and statements from the alleged victims that detailed a pattern of violent sexual abuse they suffered at Cunningham’s hands.

“(The records show) a picture of a very dangerous man,” proescutor Cassie Graham told the court. “He not was only sexually abusing children, but he’s doing it in a violent way.”

She told the court that one of the girls said Cunninghman slapped and choked her to unconsciousness while he raped her.

Graham told the court the investigation indicates Cunningham manipulated the girls into a sexual relationship by convincing them that he planned to leave his wife and be with them when they turned 18.

She told the court there was an “overwhelming” amount of corroboration from church workers who witnessed Cunningham’s inappropriate behavior with the girls while on mission trips abroad and out of state that he specifically requested them to join.

One of the statements submitted to the court reportedly comes from a church worker who said Cunningham was told during a trip in New Mexico that it was inappropriate “to have 16 year old girls sleeping in his lap.”

Graham provided the court pictures from those mission trips that showed Cunningham posing with the girls “where his hand placement is close to the breast of both of the victims like he’s in a (romantic) relationship.”

Graham also provided the court with screenshots of messages Cunningham sent the girls asking them to minimize the inappropriate conduct. The messages reportedly shows Cunningham instructing them to tell anyone who discovered their relationship that it only involved inappropriate texts, that they “made out a couple of times,” and that he touched their breasts once.

She said Cunningham told both girls not to screenshot any of their conversations. However, one of the girls can be seen saving the conversation as Cunningham deleted them.

Graham told the court that the investigation indicated that Cunningham’s predatory behavior goes back to at least 2013.

Wood told the court that during his investigation, he spoke with a pastor at a church in Fort Worth who told him Cunningham quit on the spot in 2015 after he said he couldn’t abide by a church policy prohibiting unsupervised contact with youth.

After leaving the church there he moved to Lubbock where he worked at Turning Point Community Church and Church on the Rock.

Graham told the court that there were potentially more victims of Cunningham’s abuse. She said investigators spoke with a third teenager who attended Turning Point Church and said Cunningham threw her against a vending machine then held her down on the floor when she didn’t “give him the attention he wanted.”

She said the teens listed as victims in his two cases also told investigators that Cunningham would “threaten any young man in the youth group with romantic inclinations to (the girls).”

Wood told the court that soon after obtaining an arrest warrant for Cunningham, investigators had difficulty finding him.

A review of traffic-light-mounted license plate readers in Lubbock showed one of Cunningham’s vehicles was spotted on June 9.

However, law enforcement agents couldn’t find Cunningham and turned to his family, who would not give them his exact location, just telling them he was in New Mexico, Wood said.

Wood said Cunningham’s family also didn’t let investigators know he’d returned to Lubbock before he was arrested.

King didn’t address the details of the investigation against his client during his closing argument, but asked the court to consider the three-year delay between police learning of the allegations against his client and his arrest, saying it showed officials didn’t believe his client was an immediate threat to the community. He also told the court there were no other outcries against his client.

“The (Lubbock County District Attorney’s Office) and law enforcement certainly had the ability to move on this case starting back at least 2022,” he argued. “But years transpired. If he was a danger (to the community) or a flight risk, then certainly the state would have acted when they heard of the allegations.”

He said that once his client learned police obtained a warrant for his arrest, he returned to Lubbock and was apprehended without incident at his home.

“He’s actually waiting outside of his house for law enforcement to come and effectuate the arrest,” he said.

Graham argued the court should keep Cunningham’s bond unchanged for the safety of the community, the listed victims and potential victims.

District Judge Douglas Freitag did not rule on Cunningham’s bond reduction request at the end of the hearing.

Meanwhile, officials believe there are more victims in the case and are asking them to reach out to the Lubbock Police Department at 806-775-2817.

This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: Prosecutors call former Lubbock youth pastor sexually violent predator