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I just found out my 5th grade teacher is a convicted child molester

Discussion in 'Anything goes' started by Mizzougrad96, Nov 11, 2013.

  1. Mizzougrad96

    Mizzougrad96 Active Member

    As some of you know from a previous thread, I had a friend from my childhood reach out to me to make amends for something he did when we were kids. I hadn't seen him since I was 13 and he reached out as part of his ongoing AA treatment.

    A couple weeks later, his on again, off-again wife reached out to me to thank me for responding to him and forgiving him. She said enough people had told him to fuck off that it was hurting his progress.

    So he and I have traded messages on FB a couple times a week since. Nothing of any grand importance. Last week, I messaged him and said, "Oh, this summer I went through a box of baseball cards that had been closed since 1987 and in it, I found a folder from our 5th grade class..."

    He messages me back: Yeah, and that was fucked up Mr. Green (his actual name) did.

    I asked what he was talking about and he said that three years after we had this teacher, he had been arrested and pled guilty to molesting four kids. Apparently, this happened in 1987-88. I was in this guy's class in 1984-85. One of the kids he molested was the little brother of a kid I grew up with...

    I had moved in 1987 and the teacher didn't plead guilty until 1991, so that's part of why I had never heard about it.

    I found the story on google and was even able to locate the teacher through the sex offenders registry. Unfortunately he's still alive at 82 and living in Bakersfield. He was sentenced to 12 years, but I have no idea how many of those he served.

    This guy was everybody's favorite teacher. He coached the flag football team through the school (I played Pop Warner, so I wasn't a part of that), his wife was an administrator at the school (sort of like a vice-principal) and everybody liked her too... They had both been there for 20+ years when I was there.

    I was relaying this story to a friend of mine from high school and he told me a similar one that he had found out about after the fact.

    This scares me more as a parent than anything else. I know so many people who had someone in their past make a move on them or something, even if it didn't lead to anything else and I feel extremely fortunate that I never had that happen to me, but knowing that one of my teachers actually did this to someone I know will make me paranoid or diligent (depending on how you want to look at it) about every teacher, coach etc... that my kids have to deal with.

    Anyone else have a similar experience?
     
  2. YankeeFan

    YankeeFan Well-Known Member

    Do you think he might have molested your friend?
     
  3. Amy

    Amy Well-Known Member

    I worked fairly closely on a project with a guy who is now in prison for killing the husband of his alleged girlfriend. I liked the guy. He became a mentor to another woman on our team. He was found guilty but mentally ill. The shooting happened maybe two years after the project closed. I didn't have a clue there was anything wrong with him.
     
  4. Mizzougrad96

    Mizzougrad96 Active Member

    He admitted to molesting my friend's little brother.

    Apparently, he got divorced two years after I was in his class and as far as anyone knows, started doing this the following year. Based on the police report and the stories that I could find online, they contacted the parents of any student he had when he moved up to teach sixth grade, which was the year I was in seventh grade, because that's when he started going with the classes on this weeklong Wilderness trip that we all took in sixth grade, which is where the incidents apparently started.
     
  5. MisterCreosote

    MisterCreosote Well-Known Member

    Within five years of my graduating high school, at least four people there - a teacher, two coaches and an administrator - all got arrested for and convicted of child molestation.

    Moral of the story: If you're worried about this, keeping your kids away from Catholic schools would be a great start.
     
  6. heyabbott

    heyabbott Well-Known Member

    Is there a self esteem issue if your teacher doesn't molest you? Wasn't I pretty enough?
     
  7. Mizzougrad96

    Mizzougrad96 Active Member

    I've never understood that line of thinking. Two of the kids who were targeted had really fucked up family lives. I don't know anything about the other two...
     
  8. Baron Scicluna

    Baron Scicluna Well-Known Member

    My wife and I had a friend of mine from college who we'd lost contact with over the years. A while back, I was looking up some old college friends and finally found him (he had a pretty common name).

    Found out he had become a teacher and a coach ... and was in jail for molesting a kid.

    My wife was pretty sad when I showed her the news stories. Obviously, we decided not to contact him.

    The guy was the first person I knew who had been out of the closet as gay. Before, to me, homosexuality had been an abstract concept that I knew little about other than newspaper stories, books, etc., And he had shown to me that a person being gay wasn't a big deal, it was just who he was, which taught me to respect others regardless of their sexuality. Sadly, he ended up fucking up his life, and some poor kid's.
     
  9. Mizzougrad96

    Mizzougrad96 Active Member

    It's crazy to even try to comprehend.

    A guy I worked with told me a story about him walking home from school with a friend during a storm when he was 10. A car pulled up and motioned for him to get into the car. His friend got into the car, he didn't. His friend got molested and it kind of became the beginning of the end for him. He turned to drugs and eventually OD'd and died when he was 16. The guy had a tremendous amount of guilt about it, even though he did nothing wrong. It's easy to see how an incident like that could fuck you up, even if nothing directly happened to you.
     
  10. So you are worked with the guy who wrote Mystic River?
     
  11. Mizzougrad96

    Mizzougrad96 Active Member

    It's interesting... When I played Pop Warner or Little League 30+ years ago, our parents would drop us off and come back two hours later to pick us up when practice was done.

    When my son was playing Pop Warner, every parent, with a couple rare exceptions, would stay for the entire practice. It was the same way with their basketball practices when that started.
     
  12. outofplace

    outofplace Well-Known Member

    Nothing from when I was a child, but one reporter I used to know fairly well from running into him at various events was arrested for trying to pick up an underage girl online. Turns out, he set up a meeting with an undercover cop when he thought he was meeting a very young girl (I forget what age). When they searched his vehicle (a van, I think), they found a child pornography.

    The whole thing left me trying to remember if I had shaken hands with him the last time I saw him and made me want to wash mine just in case.

    Also found out a high school girls basketball coach I knew got arrested for having sex with a minor. He got involved with his team's star player when she was 16 and it continued until she was in college before she finally turned on him.
     
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