Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog

A former Texas teacher received the maximum sentence of 30 years in federal prison after pleading guilty to producing child pornography—specifically videos showing her performing sexual acts on a prepubescent child.

Sonya Conchita Murillo, 33, was a substitute teacher for the Marfa Independent School District in West Texas.

Murillo was arrested in June 2023 on federal sexual exploitation of children charges, a month after her boyfriend was arrested on similar charges. She has been held in federal custody without bond ever since.

The former teacher pleaded guilty in January to one count of production of child pornography; four additional counts were dropped.

“The fact that the judge delivered the maximum allowed 30-year imprisonment to this defendant for producing child pornography, is indicative of the utterly horrendous predatory acts Murillo committed,” said U.S. Attorney Jaime Esparza in a Justice Department statement.

Murrillo’s one-time boyfriend Patricio Javier “PJ” Serrano, a youth softball coach in Marfa, was arrested in May 2023 for possessing child sexual abuse materials featuring images and videos of prepubescent boys.

While investigating Serrano, authorities found at least eight Snapchat videos of Murillo performing sexual acts on a boy who was 3 to 5 years old, according to an affidavit filed in the case.

If you had done this on a 3-5 year old 40 years ago in west Texas, I strongly suspect you’d get a bullet in the back of your head and a shallow grave, no law enforcement involvement required.

A federal judge has rejected an immunity claim by a Central Texas school administrator accused of facilitating a male teacher’s molestation of a 5-year-old female student in 2020-21.

The judge found that Lorena Primary School Principal April Jewell’s lack of action to protect pre-K children from a teacher’s sexual abuse “shocks the conscience.”

According to a lawsuit filed last year by the victim’s parents, Jewell ignored months of warnings from multiple school employees about inappropriate behavior by the teacher, Nicolas Scot Crenshaw, toward two of his female students.

Crenshaw eventually pleaded guilty to multiple counts of aggravated sexual assault of a young child and other sex crimes against the students and was sentenced to 40 years in prison.

Jewell kept her job as the school’s principal, shocking many parents who say the ordeal has shattered their trust in the local school system.

In a May 20 report to U.S. District Judge Alan Albright, Magistrate Judge Jeffrey Manske rejected Jewell’s claim to qualified immunity and recommended that her motion to dismiss the parents’ case against her be denied.

Parents of the victim, identified as Jane Doe, are suing April Jewell and Lorena Independent School District for failing to protect their then 5-year-old daughter from months of sexual abuse by pre-K teacher Nicolas Scot Crenshaw during the 2020-21 academic year.

Crenshaw was a long-term substitute teacher at Lorena Primary School, where Jewell was—and still is—the principal.

At the beginning of the school year, Crenshaw shared a class with another teacher.

According to court documents, in January 2021 teachers and other school staff began reporting to Jewell about Crenshaw’s inappropriate behavior with Jane, which included him lying under a blanket with Jane during nap time and frequently placing her on his lap or having her straddle him.

An aide even gave Jewell photos of Crenshaw’s suspicious behavior, but she was reprimanded by Jewell for taking the pictures.

What principled principal would receive repeated reports of a teacher creeping on young children and go “Nah, it’s fine?”

A Texas charter school teacher is in jail after being accused of sexually assaulting a 12-year-old student. The visiting international teacher had been reprimanded and then fired for placing his hands on students, but the school later rehired him.

International Leadership of Texas teacher Jose Adrian Hernandez Grimaldo, 46, was arrested last month and charged with one count of aggravated sexual assault of a child, a first-degree felony punishable by 5 to 99 years in prison.

At the time of the alleged assault, Hernandez Grimaldo taught at the ILTexas K-8 school in College Station. He later transferred to the school’s Lancaster K-8 campus where he worked at the time of his arrest.

According to an arrest report from the College Station Police Department, the female victim alleges the teacher attacked her in a bathroom in February 2023. She told police he threatened to kill her if she told anyone about the attack.

Hernandez Grimaldo denied the allegations, but according to a report by KBTX, he failed a polygraph test.

ILTexas Superintendent Eddie Conger confirmed in a statement Friday that, as a result of the arrest, Hernandez Grimaldo was terminated from ILTexas on May 24.

The ILTexas statement included a timeline of Hernandez Grimaldo’s employment with the school system.

Hernandez Grimaldo, who is in the U.S. on a teaching visa, was hired in August 2022 to teach Spanish at ILTexas’ College Station K-8 campus. According to the timeline, he cleared a standard background check and additional security clearance from the Department of Homeland Security.

I hardly think we need to be importing child molesters from other countries. We seem to have quite enough trouble with the home-grown variety.

He was placed on administrative leave and reprimanded in October 2022 for putting his hands on a student.

In March 2023, Hernandez Grimaldo was terminated from ILTexas following more complaints about him touching students.

He then filed a grievance and the district overturned his termination in May 2023.

“We can’t hire this guy! He had multiple complaints that he was molesting students!” “But wait! He filed a grievance! We have to hire him back so he can molest more children!”

Sounds like the person in charge of managing the grievance process also needs to be fired.

The teacher was offered a transfer and began working at ILTexas Lancaster K-8 in August 2023.

In September 2023, a parent reported to the ILTexas College Station principal that inappropriate sexual interactions took place between their then-6th-grade student and Hernandez Grimaldo.

He was again placed on administrative leave in October 2023.

Superintendent Conger said ILTexas investigated but was unable to substantiate the sexual assault claims. Hernandez Grimaldo was reinstated as a teacher at ILTexas Lancaster K-8 in January 2024.

The superintendent said ILTexas filed “required reports with the local police department, Department of Family and Protective Services within 48 hours of initial notice, and the State Board of Education as appropriate.”

Just how many sexual assault claims are needed until a charge is considered “substantiated?” People were willing to give Bill Cosby the benefit of the doubt when it was one or two women accusing him, but the scale tipped well before the 60 or so who eventually came forward. Grimaldo should never have been put back into a position to molest children after the initial charges.

A Houston-area elementary school teacher filmed sexually explicit videos of herself while on campus, and community leaders are demanding that her teaching certificate be revoked.

Adrienne Harborth was a music teacher at Gray Elementary in Lamar Consolidated Independent School District in Fort Bend County near Houston.

Harborth can be seen in two videos shaking her bare breasts and buttocks while in a classroom and a bathroom at the school. Harborth’s school ID badge with her name printed on it is also visible.

[Blinks] This is not exactly what people think of when discussing the perfect crime. I think the Babylon Bee would reject the ID badge detail in one of their stories. “Nah, too heavy handed.”

Censored versions of the videos, first posted by Grizzy’s Hood News under the title “Teacher Gone Wild,” have gone viral on the internet.

My cousin told me about Grizzy’s Hood News a while back. Basically a Houston woman went “OK, I’m gonna start my own news web page,” and now she breaks a lot of news that seems too spicy for mainstream Houston media. That “Teacher Gone Wild” video is no longer up, but, having watched a bit of it, I can assure you that you didn’t miss anything…

Harborth has since told Texas Scorecard she filmed the videos on the weekend, not during school hours, and that an ex-boyfriend released the videos as revenge porn.

“I want to shoot a nude video of myself. I know! I’ll go down to my school and wear my name tag! That can’t possibly backfire on me!”

Shooting a nude video of yourself is a pretty stupid thing to do, especially if you’re not a porn star. While people may be inclined to forgive such a thing if it was a mistake made in youth (say, drunk college girls on spring break), doing it at your place of work is going to be a firing offense pretty much everywhere, but especially at a public school.