[Home] [Headlines] [Latest Articles] [Latest Comments] [Post] [Mail] [Sign-in] [Setup] [Help] [Register]
|
Status: Not Logged In; Sign In
LEFT WING LOONS Title: Teachers arrested for bondage games with students Victim's Mother: 'I Was Told Photos Were Not Important' The mother of an alleged victim says a school staffer tried to dissuade her from meeting with detectives investigating Mark Berndt. 2:02 p.m. PST, February 4, 2012 SOUTH LOS ANGELES, Calif. (KTLA) -- An attorney representing a student at Miramonte Elementary School said Friday that accused teacher Mark Berndt recruited children from after-school programs and other teachers' classes to take part in so-called "tasting games." In these games, children were photographed while blindfolded, with cockroaches on their faces and asked to taste a liquid that police now believe was Berndt's semen. Attorney Brian E. Claypool said his client, was 9-years-old when her photograph was taken multiple times by Berndt, although she was not his student. "The potential pool of victims is beyond the classroom," Claypool said in a news conference outside the South L.A. campus. District officials confirmed that not all of Berndt's alleged victims have been identified and some, like Claypool's client, weren't even his students. Claypool's young client's mother, "Maria," says about seven months ago, she was summoned to a sheriff's substation to look at Berndt's now-infamous photo collection. "When I arrived at the sheriff station they had an album full of children and I found several pictures of my daughter from different days because she was wearing different clothes in each picture," Maria told KTLA in an exclusive interview. But before meeting with sheriff's investigators, Maria called Miramonte Elementary to tell staffers she'd be taking her daughter out of school early. She also told them why. "The staff member at the after-school program told me that it was not important for me to go look at the photographs and that I shouldn't go," Maria said. "My daughter was just given cookies and that it was not important for me to go look at the photographs." When she met with investigators, they weren't forthcoming about what she saw in those strange photos of her daughter blindfolded and eating cookies covered in a "white substance," she said. Maria wanted the pictures and she wanted to confront Berndt but detectives told her to "keep quiet" and she could not take the photographs with her as they were still in the process of investigating Berndt. Instead, Maria confronted the supervisor of that after-school program the next day. "(The supervisor told me,) 'If you have a problem with this then take your kids out of the after school program, because this is a teacher that we've known and he's been teaching here for close to thirty years and there's not a problem with us releasing students into his care.' " And releasing students into Berndt's care was a common practice for staffers of the after-school program, Maria alleges. "He would send a note to the supervisor or to the staff member that was working at the after school program, and tell them how many girls and which girls he wanted to be sent to his room," she said. And Claypool believes the actions of the after-school staffers hint at an ugly truth: that other school staff members aided in the alleged horror that went on in Berndt's classroom. "This is a systemic institutional failure," he said. "I think this is a flat out cover-up at the school. They need to clean house -- top to bottom." When Maria spoke to her daughter about Berndt and those strange photographs, the young girl initially denied it all. But she eventually told her mother that Berndt had taken the photos having convinced her it was all a game. "He would blindfold her lovely little daughter and you know what he would tell her? 'Hey, you're Mexican. Just pretend you're doing a piñata, don't ya'll do those piñatas? Just pretend you're doing that. It's a game.' " Claypool said. ."That is clearly taking an advantage of this family and predatorily." Berndt, a 30-year veteran teacher, was investigated more than once in the past for inappropriate behavior. In January 1994, officials reported "an attempted fondling" at Miramonte Elementary School, Los Angeles County Sheriff's Sgt. Dan Scott told the L.A. Times. A girl who was 10 years old reported that Berndt, now 61, tried to touch her over her clothes near her genital area. Sheriff's detectives investigated the allegation and presented their findings to the district attorney's office. Prosecutors rejected the case saying there was not enough evidence to charge Berndt with a crime, Scott said. Scott told the Times he discovered the case Wednesday evening while reviewing records. L.A. schools Superintendent John Deasy confirmed he was aware of an episode of alleged inappropriate behavior by Berndt "sometime in the 1990s." The Los Angeles Unified School District officials have launched an internal investigation to determine if there are any records of past incidents or suspicions involving Berndt. Berndt is being held on $23 million bail, $1 million for each of the 23 felony counts of lewd acts on a child against him. He faces life in prison if convicted of the charges against him. He is due back in court Feb. 21, when he is expected to enter a plea. More of Berndt's alleged victims have contacted sheriff's investigators since his arrest. Two women said Wednesday that school officials investigated rumors about Berndt back in 1990. Marlene Trujillo, who was a fourth-grader in his class at the time, spoke to the Times about Berndt's bizarre behavior. She said Berndt often moved his hands under his desk, near his lap, at the front of the classroom. She and other students had seen a jar of Vaseline in one of his desk compartments, she told the Times. Trujillo, now 30, said she was called before a school counselor with two other girls after one of them complained about Berndt's alleged behavior. She said the counselor chalked it up to the girls' vivid imaginations and the subject was dropped. One of her classmates at the time, Nadine Martinez Rodriguez, told the Times she also noticed Berndt's behavior behind his desk. Martinez said she told her mother about it at the time, but her mother didn't take it seriously enough to report it to school officials. The current investigation into Berndt's activities began in October 2010, when he turned in a roll of 35-mm film to be processed at a CVS pharmacy in Redondo Beach. Employees at the store found more than 40 photographs of kids in a school classroom, with their eyes blindfolded and mouths covered with tape. They notified police as required by California law. Some of the photos depicted Berndt with his arm around the children, or with his hand over their mouths, according to police. Sheriff's Lt. Carlos Marquez of the Special Victims Bureau said it was determined the children were given semen on a spoon or on a cookie. A blue plastic spoon and container found in the trash in Berndt's classroom tested positive for semen, and the DNA matched Berndt, authorities said. None of the photos showed the students actually eating the semen, but Marquez said the children reported they didn't like the taste. There were also photos of children with large, live Madagascar-type cockroaches on their faces and mouths. Sheriff's detectives served a search warrant at Berndt's home in Torrance, where they found 100 others, depicting similar scenes. They also discovered a DVD depicting adult sexual "bondage," which instigators say mirrored the bondage-type pictures of the children. An additional 250 photographs were later recovered by Sheriff's Special Victims Bureau detectives from the film processing store. Police say there were more than 26 children identified in the 390 total photos. Police say the alleged crimes occurred between 2008 and 2010, and involved boys and girls between 6 and 10 years old. Detectives say so far none of the children have claimed Berndt raped or sexually assaulted them. KTLA spoke this week with one of Berndt's former students. The boy, who is now a seventh-grader, was in Berdnt's third grade class. He said Berndt never touched him inappropriately, but he did describe some bizarre behavior that went on in the classroom. The boy said that he and his classmates would pick sticks from a jar every month to designate class responsibilities. "He would blindfold us and tell us to pick a lollipop stick from a container," the boy said. "He liked insects a lot," the boy continued. "He did have cockroaches. There was one picture of him, and he was holding one cockroach in his hand." LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy said in a statement that he is "sickened and horrified by the behavior of Mark Berndt." Deasy said he was notified about the investigation on Jan. 7, 2011. According to Deasy: "Mark Berndt was immediately removed from the school the same day and the Los Angeles Board of Education, at its next meeting, approved his termination." But Berndt was never fired, instead he was allowed to resign. As a result, he retains lifetime health benefits that he earned through decades of service in L.A. Unified, including nearly $4,000 a month in pension from the California State Teachers' Retirement System. Authorities believe there may be additional victims.
Poster Comment: So do you know what's going on in your school system???
Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
#1. To: CZ82 (#0)
Union teachers protect their own, no matter how perverted they are. That's why Obama made pedophile fag Kevin Jennings his Safe School Czar, to cover for all the union perverts out there in government schools.
|
|
[Home] [Headlines] [Latest Articles] [Latest Comments] [Post] [Mail] [Sign-in] [Setup] [Help] [Register]
|