Teacher Enters Not-Guilty Plea

Additional sex charges were filed Friday against an Orange County teacher accused of molesting two male students, relationships that law enforcement sources say she fueled with e-mails and secret dinners and chronicled in her journal.

Sarah Bench-Salorio, 28, pleaded not guilty to all 28 lewd-conduct charges filed against her. Attorney Allan Stokke asked that Bench-Salorio’s $1-million bail be lowered to $100,000 or less so she could be released from jail.

“I think even the $100,000 was meant to be used when some male child molester was with six or seven children,” Stokke said. “This situation should be considered much less serious than that.”

Bench-Salorio, the wife of a former school board candidate, faces up to 62 years in state prison if convicted on all charges.

The eight new charges involve a former student already identified in court documents as John Doe No. 2. Prosecutors say she had sex with him over a period of 16 months, starting when he was 12. The student came forward with information about additional incidents in the last week, Deputy Dist. Atty. John Christl said.

The prosecutor said the teacher started a relationship with 13-year-old John Doe No. 1 when the other boy’s parents became suspicious. Both boys were in her English class last year, he said.

Bench-Salorio was arrested at Santiago Charter Middle School in Orange on Jan. 4, the day after John Doe No. 1 went with his parents to report her alleged conduct to police. Christl said that relationship appeared to have lasted about four months.

In journals obtained through search warrants at her home in Orange, Bench-Salorio wrote poetry, made various sketches and referred without naming them to the alleged victims, the prosecutor said. “There’s volumes and volumes that were seized,” Christl said.

A decision on whether to lower the teacher’s bail was postponed until Wednesday to allow her attorney to review paperwork that detention-and-release clerk Lou De Fusco submitted. The documents cite statements from Orange Det. Elizabeth Hoffman, who interviewed Bench-Salorio after her arrest.

“The suspect made a statement regarding suicide, fleeing the area and having nothing to stay for,” De Fusco said in Superior Court Commissioner Cheryl L. Leininger’s Santa Ana courtroom. “She said she wanted to contact the victims upon her release.”

During the 20-minute hearing, Bench-Salorio stood with hunched shoulders, occasionally exchanging long looks with her parents and husband.

Before the hearing, Stokke turned over a three-ring binder filled with letters submitted by teachers and students on his client’s behalf.

“She loved this business of teaching, apart from this business of whatever happened here,” Stokke said in court. “She was an excellent, excellent teacher.” The students’ letters, he said, discussed how she took children who weren’t interested in school and improved their reading and writing.

The people who wrote were not aware of her activities with her students, Christl countered, adding that the commissioner should keep her bail high enough so her family cannot post it.