5 hours ago
1
A Florida teacher busted in an online predator sting operation for allegedly trying to arrange sex with “a 14-year-old” has been charged and released on bond in yet another case in the troubling national trend known as “educator sexual misconduct.”
Police in Saint Cloud, an Orlando suburb, arrested 34-year-old Hayden Anthis on Thursday, alleging the mathematics teacher spent nearly two months talking with an undercover detective who was posing as a 14-year-old girl online.
WATCH:
Anthis has served as a high school geometry teacher with the Osceola County School District for nearly ten years, Orlando’s WFTV reported.
However, after his apprehension, the district said he was “immediately banned” from all district properties, according to news outlets. As a condition of his release, pending trial, the Court ordered Anthis not to have any contact with minors.
“Investigators said Anthis began corresponding in an online forum with a person he thought was a 14-year-old girl and arranged to meet her. Instead, he was met by law enforcement officers and arrested,” Fox 35 reported.
The police department released a statement:
Our department’s Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) detectives usually assist other law enforcement agencies by gathering information and building cases against some of the internet’s worst humans, but back in June they started chatting with a local. He thought he would be wearing the condoms and eating the Skittles candy he brought along with him, but instead is wearing handcuffs.
Under Florida’s “Computer Pornography and Child Exploitation Prevention Act,” soliciting a person believed to be a minor under the age of 16 is a felony which can carry a prison sentence from 5 to 15 years.
An exclusive Breitbart News investigation in March revealed that “educator sexual misconduct” has been described by leading researchers as “rampant” in the U.S. in the past two decades, with reports making national headlines weekly.
The disturbing pattern of educator sexual abuse nationwide is occurring in school districts large and small, urban and rural, public and private, secular and parochial, Breitbart News found.
Causes cited by researchers range from a “culture of permissiveness” to the ability of teachers and students to communicate secretly on the internet, and the reluctance of staff to report suspicious behavior for fear of disrupting school harmony.
Anthis has not been charged with any illegal activity at his former school.
Breitbart News contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the author of the New York Times true crime best seller House of Secrets, which documents one of the worst cases of child sex abuse in U.S. history, and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.
English (US)