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Our society is supposed to take the sexual exploitation of children seriously, but one of the most liberal states just gave a minor slap on the wrist to a sex offender who used their position for lewd acts.
According to The New York Post, a public school teacher in the Bronx pleaded guilty to a criminal sex act with a 14-year-old child. Instead of receiving prison time or even losing their teaching license, however, the disgraced educator was given only probation by the judge.
Outraged yet? Here’s a detail that may have swayed the case: The teacher is a woman, and the 14-year-old student is a boy.
That shouldn’t make a difference in a crime like this, but it’s hard to imagine a male receiving the same sentence after using his position of authority to take sexual advantage of a girl who is under the age of consent. So much for gender equality.
“Dori Myers, 29, a social studies teacher at The New School for Leadership and the Arts in Kingsbridge, pleaded guilty to a criminal sex act — a D felony requiring her to register as a sex offender,” reported The Post.
Myers — who is married to a sheriff’s officer — admitted that she performed oral sex on the 14-year-old boy several different times. Because of the details of that activity, it is not considered statutory rape under New York law, but it does fall under felony sexual misconduct.
“Prosecutors requested that Justice Michael Orbus sentence Myers to two years in prison and order that she surrender her New York state teaching certificate,” explained The Post. Instead, the judge assigned her ten years of probation and left the fate of her teaching certificate up in the air.
“This would be a matter that any licensing agency will be able to consider, if they choose to do that, and of course any employer,” said Judge Orbus.
Do you think the sentence would have been more serious if the genders were reversed?
“There is a possibility that she could teach adults now or in the future and we want to preserve that possibility,” maintained Andrew Stoll, the teacher’s defense attorney.
“She still is a talented teacher and has those skills, and I don’t see any reason to destroy her ability to make a living and to contribute to society in a positive way,” he continued.
Talented and skilled — well, that’s one way to put it.
Interestingly, Myers first claimed she was not guilty of the sexual crime, and her attorney seemed to dismiss the allegation as fabricated by the teenage boy.
“It just takes one person’s accusation to make an arrest in this town and she’s a model citizen who looks forward to clearing her name,” said her lawyer. What happened to believing all accusers in cases like this?
Her plea changed to guilty after the 14-year-old maintained his claim and witnesses corroborated the allegations.
In the age of “MeToo” and constant calls for gender equality, it is very revealing that one of the most liberal parts of the country apparently doesn’t believe their own narratives.
If the social justice crowd truly wants sexual crimes investigated and victims taken seriously, they could start by enforcing these kinds of offenses proportionately.
Either genders are actually equal or they’re not, but New York can’t seem to make up its mind. Double standards have no place in the law.
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In the final moments of her life, 16-year-old Valaree Schwab was just trying to get back her house keys.
The New Rochelle High School junior had slipped out for lunch at around noon on Jan. 10 despite a policy against leaving campus at the award-winning school.
She was soon knocked to the ground and robbed at a nearby McDonald’s by a gang of school bullies. Then her teenage tormentors — who harassed her on a daily basis about her tattoos, love for the band Nirvana and affinity for social activism — proceeded to stalk her for the next hour.
They followed her into a Subway sandwich shop and then a Dunkin’ Donuts — where she would spend her last conscious seconds gasping for air, clutching the hand of a young cashier as blood poured from two stab wounds to her heart and lungs.
“She didn’t even know she was stabbed,” the worker recalled to The Post.
“She was screaming, saying that somebody stole her keys . . . The next thing you know, you see a commotion, and then everybody’s gone, and then [she was] just standing by herself, bleeding.”
The green-eyed teen flatlined once in the ambulance, again at the hospital and a final time at around 4 p.m., just after her school’s eighth period would have ended.
“She was bullied, stalked, assaulted, robbed and ultimately stabbed and murdered by her own classmates,” said Valaree’s aunt, Monica Furrelle Schwab.
“There aren’t too many words to express how we feel.”
Over the next eight days, two more New Rochelle High students were assaulted in another possible bullying case.
Parents, teachers and students in the well-off, leafy Westchester County enclave appeared baffled over how the spate of violence could have happened in their typically peaceful town, where the most they usually had to worry about was the occasional schoolyard scuffle.
Pizzeria owner Michael Napolitano, 45, whose shop was the scene of the second violent incident, said that in the two and a half decades that he has owned local businesses, he has never seen anything like it.
“It’s a good community, it’s a good school,’’ Napolitano said of New Rochelle High, whose grads include “60 Minutes’’ founder Don Hewitt, TV journalist Andrea Mitchell and “Shaft’’ movie star Richard Roundtree.
“Great kids come out of [the school]. It’s sad. It’s gotta get better.”
Behavioral experts aren’t sure how fast change can come.
“It’s everywhere — it’s everywhere,” Andrea Altshuler, a clinical social worker specializing in adolescents, said of bullying.
“I think that growing up now is so different than anything we experienced,’’ she told The Post. “There are so many more different avenues for bullying than there ever has been in history.
“Kids getting exposed to such a windfall of information that they don’t understand creates pent-up anxiety, pent-up anger, pent-up emotion that manifests itself in impulsive activity in adolescents.
“Maybe in some level that’s what’s happening at New Rochelle.”
Police say 16-year-old New Rochelle student Z’Inah Brown was among Valaree’s five or six tormentors that violent day — and allegedly killed the teen with a steak knife after she dared to fight back with pepper spray.
Modal TriggerZ’Inah BrownWestchester County District Attorney's Office
On a sunny Friday morning soon after Valaree’s death, Maryann Coyle, 54, and her daughter Melissa, 18, went to the Dunkin’ Donuts where Schwab was killed.
“We feel jittery even coming in here after that,” Maryann said, holding a bag of doughnuts and orange juice.
While a makeshift memorial to Valaree, replete with stuffed animals, drawings and handwritten notes, had been growing outside the North Avenue Dunkin’ Donuts, violence involving students at the school has only been intensifying.
A week after Valaree’s death, a 15-year-old student was followed to Gemelli’s Pizzeria, on North Avenue, and jumped by a group of older teens while trying to order a slice. Some said the attack was a form of bullying.
Police said six or seven young men between the ages of 16 and 17 swarmed the victim — who admittedly had been violent when younger — throwing chairs and bottles at him. Police said the victim grabbed a few wine bottles to defend himself and chased the boys out of the restaurant.
“I ran up there, and it was just a mess,’’ shop owner Napolitano told The Post.
“A bunch of broken bottles of wine all over the place, blood, some tables were broken, food on the floor.”
The next day, the boy who was attacked came to school allegedly ready for battle.
At around 8:50 a.m., in a classroom right before third period, he plunged a weapon into the torso of a 16-year-old boy, leaving the stabbed teen with a punctured lung and lacerated spleen. The 15-year-old attacker then fled and is still at large.
The community, already fractured by Valaree’s death, reeled.
Modal TriggerA police officer outside New Rochelle High SchoolDavid McGlynn
Parents flocked to the campus. Teachers locked their doors. Frantic texts were exchanged. How could this happen again?
Erica Martinez, whose 15-year-old son, Gianni, was close friends with Valaree, said her boy was scared to say goodbye to her before heading off to school the morning after the third attack.
“He said, ‘Well, Mom, I hope I don’t get stabbed today,’ ” Martinez, 47, recalled.
Gianni told The Post that after the third violent incident, “Everybody was panicking.
“Like, who’s next? What’s going to happen?” he said.
Maryann Coyle, the mom at Dunkin’, said she takes students to the high school every morning as part of a car pool, and “I had one [student] this morning, she didn’t want to go to school today because she’s scared.’’
Modal TriggerMaryann Coyle outside Dunkin’ Donuts where high school student Valeree Schwab was stabbed to deathDavid McGlynn
The recent statistics on bullying are sobering.
According to StopBullying.gov, nearly a quarter of US students in grades 6 through 12 have experienced bullying, and more than 70 percent have witnessed it firsthand in school.
Cedeno, 18, later told The Post in a jailhouse interview that he “just snapped.” He said he had suffered from bullying since the sixth grade for being bisexual and dressing differently.
Dr. Jennifer Powell-Lunder, a Westchester therapist and adjunct professor at Pace University for graduate psychology students, said, “Why are responses so violent these days?
“Some research has told us the threshold for shock has really gone down because kids today are so much more exposed to violence with social media and the internet.
“So they’re not understanding the severity of their responses and just how scary and violent they are.”
Altshuler, the Westchester social worker, said some parents are little help.
“Adults now don’t understand what kids have to deal with because we didn’t experience it with all the technology and how kids can never turn off,’’ she said.
“There’s no time for kids to just . . . be home with their family alone, relax their brain and just be — because there’s always the pressure of social media.’’
Alana Millings, a therapist who works behind the Dunkin’ Donuts where Valaree was murdered, said, “I don’t know what it all means, but I do know that these are not isolated [bullying] incidents.
“Obviously, at the level of murdering someone, that doesn’t happen every day. But certainly the amount of bullying that goes on between students seems pretty unfortunately par for the course.’’
“People bully for so many different reasons,’’ she said. “But most the time it’s because they themselves have been bullied.
“So it’s really just an ongoing cycle of victims turning into bullies and then more victims turning into bullies.”
School officials in New Rochelle say they are taking steps to try to curb bullying in the wake of the recent violence.
For example, New Rochelle Schools Superintendent Brian Osborne said at a recent public meeting that the high school’s policy of “closed lunch’’ — meaning students can’t leave the building — needs to be better regulated.
Random bag searches also will be conducted for weapons, and an independent “top-to-bottom” audit on school safety and security across the district is underway, he said.
In addition, the district plans to create an app so students can anonymously report bullying or even brewing tensions between kids, in the hopes that adults can intervene before violence occurs.
Parents at the school say reforms are badly needed.
Modal TriggerA memorial for Valeree Schwab outside the Dunkin’ Donuts where she was stabbedDavid McGlynn
“Stuff like this shouldn’t be happening in school . . .we’re not going to allow that to happen to her,’’ Colon told The Post.
Manuel Lopez, whose 11th-grade daughter was friends with Valaree, said his child has been getting bullied repeatedly since the sixth grade.
“It affects the whole family,’’ he said, his eyes starting to fill with tears.
“My daughter is not an aggressive person. I’m constantly checking on her. I text her, ‘Are you OK? Is everything alright? Are you on the bus? Are you coming over? How’s your day? Are you all right?’ ”
Lopez said he gave his daughter pepper spray in case anyone tries to hurt her.
But, “Look what happened to Valaree. Valaree tried to defend herself with pepper spray . . . and they nailed her,” he said.
“You know I cried for that child. It broke my heart . . . She was just somebody’s baby.”
Valaree’s aunt Monica Schwab said she hopes the school’s efforts aren’t too little, too late.
“[Valaree] had written statements saying she needed help, she hated to come [to school], she didn’t want to be here,” Monica said.
“Let’s make sure no one else has to experience that.”
He was a drifter who was arrested in 2001 for beating up a cop in Queens, police sources said. Bonds allegedly used brass knuckles to pummel the cop from the 111th Precinct. Four others were involved in the beating.
Bonds had other arrests between 2000 and 2002, mostly for drugs.
Sources said Bonds had addresses all over the area, including in the Bronx, Queens and several homeless shelters.
Bonds was on parole for a 2014 robbery in Syracuse when he shot Miosotis Familia, 48, in the Fordham Heights section of the Bronx. The 12-year department veteran later died from her wounds.
