Molestation Case Involving Teacher Returns to Court

A 12-year-old Mexican girl sat grimly in front of a courtroom last week and accused a 53-year-old Oxnard man of repeatedly molesting her for two years, beginning in 1986.

Speaking through a Spanish translator, she told a Superior Court judge how Roger William Brown had convinced her mother to let her move with him to Ventura County, where in a succession of houses he allegedly persuaded her to share his bed, his shower and her body with him.

The girl, wearing thick glasses and a ponytail, was sometimes at a loss for words, but a single, common expression captured the pathos of the situation.

She repeatedly referred to Brown as “ el maestro “ in a preliminary hearing on Friday.

Brown, a blond tired-looking man, had been her teacher. On the verge of his second trial, he is charged with ten counts of molestation. His first trial ended in a hung jury last April.

While nobody is accusing the Oxnard School District of wrongdoing in the case, it still chilled parents throughout the county, and raised a question that has perplexed school districts and concerned parents across the U.S.

Screening Applicants

To what lengths can and should school districts go to screen applicants for teaching positions?

The Oxnard elementary school district, whose officials say they were shocked when the accusation surfaced a year ago, takes all the steps that are standard in public education.

Officials ask for at least four recommendations. Recognizing that employers can face lawsuits by committing negative information about former employees to writing, they also conduct telephone interviews with references, said Supt. Norm Brekke.

The district--like others statewide--relies on one of the country’s strictest licensing organizations, the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, which requires every applicant for a teaching credential to be fingerprinted so that the FBI and the state Department of Justice can check for past convictions.

The commission denies credentials, which are required for teaching jobs in California’s public schools, to applicants with a history of convictions for sex and drug crimes, said Paul Longo, the commission’s attorney.

Credentialed teachers who are found guilty of such crimes--either in courts or special hearings conducted by the commission--lose their licenses and their names appear on an advisory sent to every teachers’ licensing organization in the country, Longo said.

Early Lessons

Sex offenders who nonetheless find their way into the classroom should be further hindered from committing crimes by courses that teach children to notify authorities when they receive “a bad touch,” school officials said. In the Oxnard district, the lessons are taught in conjunction with health classes early in the primary grades, Brekke said.

Yet such incidents occur.

In California alone, 30 teachers were convicted of sexual misconduct last year, according to CTC figures.

While family members or close family friends still account for about 65% of molestation cases, school personnel--janitors, bus drivers and teachers--are responsible for 10% of the remaining cases, said Joan McKenna, director of Society’s League Against Molestation in New Jersey.

She said that the authority bestowed on teachers, whom parents urge their children to obey, and their access to children make the profession appealing to sex offenders.

“They’re with the children more than Mom and Dad,” she said.

California administrators blame lax standards in other states for enabling teachers convicted of crimes in one state to find teaching jobs in other states.

The National Assn. of State Directors of Teacher Education and Certification, which is trying to tighten screening procedures nationwide by establishing a clearinghouse of information on teachers whose credentials have been revoked, recently found an employed teacher who had been convicted of sex crimes in nine states.

“It’s easy to leave out information about convictions in another state and then slip into the system elsewhere,” said Don Megill, a NASTEC director.

No Ironclad Procedures

Licensing organizations in some states still do not have ironclad procedures for revoking credentials, so the potential exists for teachers to be convicted of sex crimes without being detected by the organization, he said.

Only two states besides California--Nevada and Florida--submit credentialing applicants to fingerprinting, which means that applicants in 47 states can omit convictions, said Richard Mastain, CTC executive secretary.

And some applicants do, even in the most vigilant states. In a study conducted two years ago, Florida’s State Department of Education found that 47 of 1,635 applicants failed to mention prior convictions for sexual misconduct.

California’s fingerprinting measures are designed to thwart past offenders who move here to find work, but they are powerless against what most administrators agree is the system’s biggest weakness--school personnel who have escaped prosecution by cutting deals with the districts in which their behavior came under fire.

In the past, some school districts have allowed teachers suspected of sexual misconduct to resign rather than face prosecution. The step spares the district and the teacher the considerable embarrassment of a public trial, but it frees teachers to find jobs elsewhere.

“The philosophy has been, ‘Try to get the situation settled as quickly as possible without embarrassment,’ ” Megill said.

Under a law enacted in April, California administrators who fail to seek the prosecution of employees suspected of sex crimes stand to lose their own administrative credentials, said CTC’s Longo.

But other states have yet to enact such legislation, which hampers California’s ability to screen such offenders, Megill said. If the teacher has not been brought to trial, he said, no conviction is possible, and without a conviction, neither the FBI nor State Department of Justice can find a record to report.

Cutting Deals

California’s law also does not address sex offenders who had cut deals before it was enacted. If they have not been convicted in the past year, their records presumably remain unsullied, allowing them to be hired by unsuspecting districts.

Meanwhile, pressures continue to mount for district officials to quietly settle cases involving sexual misconduct.

Suits against districts where children have been molested by teachers are becoming increasingly frequent and expensive, said Doug Bates, the coordinator of school law and legislation for the Utah State Office of Education.

In a 1987 case, an Oklahoma jury awarded $135,000 to the parents of three children who were molested by a teacher who had been convicted of a sex crime 14 years earlier, even though the conviction had been expunged from his record.

“A relative had warned the district that he had tried to molest a child, but he had denied it and the district had hired him,” Bates said. “The jury felt the district should have dug deeper.”

Suits in which districts were found guilty of discriminating against homosexual applicants have discouraged them from taking steps that could be construed as prying into a teacher’s sex life, Bates said.

Private schools are another can of worms, he said. While they receive the CTC advisories, they do not necessarily demand credentials, making it possible for teachers whose credentials have been revoked elsewhere to find work there.

School administrators have considered other screening measures, such as administering psychological examinations to job candidates, but have dismissed them as excessively costly and likely to meet opposition from teachers’ unions, who view them as a violation of civil liberties.

“In this country, you’re innocent until proven guilty,” said Audrey Olson Smith, a spokeswoman for the California Teachers Assn.

Hung Jury

In its first go-round last April, the Brown case ended in a hung jury. A mistrial was declared after jurors deadlocked, with eight voting for acquittal and four for conviction.

Ventura Superior Court Judge Frederick A. Jones said in court that he was astounded by the finding, noting that he believed Brown not only did everything that he was charged with but a lot more.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Matthew J. Hardy, who claims to be pursuing “51 different leads in terms of new evidence,” refiled the case.

Brown has been released on bail but he is no longer teaching at Driffill School in Oxnard. He took a leave of absence after the accusations against him surfaced in June 1988, and he resigned last month.

Hardy has maintained that the same characteristics that made the victim sometimes appear less than credible on the witness stand made her especially vulnerable.

Visually impaired and hard of hearing, the girl, whose identity the court protects, also has trouble communicating. Having lived sporadically in Mexico and the U.S., she never really mastered either Spanish or English--in Friday’s proceedings she groped for the word “jacket.” On the stand, she became confused easily.

“You couldn’t find a more vulnerable victim,” Hardy said.

By contrast, Hardy said, Brown gives the impression of being “Mr. Wonderful,” telling friends inquiring about the girl’s presence in his house that “I’ve saved her from a terrible life of poverty.”

Jurors, the prosecutor said, “took a look at this strange little girl and the Great White Hope, and they didn’t want to find him guilty on her word.”

Different Picture

Brown’s attorney, Steven D. Powell of Ventura, could not be reached for comment. But he painted a different picture in court.

He extracted details of a life in which physical abuse was so frequent that the girl might have tried anything--even a false accusation of molestation--to be removed from Brown’s house.

Under cross-examination, the girl told of being severely punished for even an infraction as slight as sneaking food. One beating was so painful, she admitted, that she felt faint afterwards.

“You hate Roger Brown, don’t you?” Powell asked.

“Yes,” the girl responded.

The girl contradicted herself occasionally and frequently failed on cross-examination to remember details that Hardy had extracted from her, fueling the defense’s suggestions that she was at best an unreliable witness or at worst the product of much coaching.

The pair’s path crossed seven years ago, when Brown, then new to the Oxnard School District, was the girl’s teacher in a summer class for students with learning disabilities, Hardy said.

Brown “singled her out for special attention,” and when her family later returned to their native Mexico, he followed her there, urging her mother on two occasions to let the girl live with him, Hardy said.

Mother Relented

He said the mother, who lived with six children in a shack outside Mexico City, finally relented because Brown promised to pay for the girl’s medical treatment as well as glasses and hearing aids.

The girl has maintained that Brown began molesting her shortly after she moved to Thousand Oaks with him in June, 1986, and continued when they later moved to an Oxnard house.

The girl didn’t tell anyone about the alleged molestations until June, 1988, when, after a severe beating, she fled to the house of an aunt, who later pressed charges.

The defense made much of the girl’s two-year wait to complain.

But prosecutors point to what they allege was Brown’s suspicious behavior while he was out on bond.

Brown, who had been forbidden to be in the company of a minor without an adult present, was found in March by district attorney’s investigators to be regularly taking the 5-year-old daughter of a girlfriend to school. The relationship was confirmed by a Headstart teacher who had visited the girlfriend’s home, according to a court document.

“Mr. Brown,” the girl allegedly said in front of the teacher, “do you want to play doctor with me.”