Crime Fix with Angenette Levy - Choir Teacher Faces New Sex Charges in School Scandal

Episode Date: January 7, 2025

Eric Stearns has been indicted on new sexual abuse charges by a grand jury in Columbia County, Oregon. Stearns was first arrested last November. A retired teacher also faces charges. A grand jury investigation into sexual abuse claims at the school district is ongoing. Law&Crime's Angenette Levy looks at the case in this episode of Crime Fix — a daily show covering the biggest stories in crime.PLEASE SUPPORT THE SHOW: Get 50% off of confidential background reports at https://www.truthfinder.com/lccrimefix and access information about almost anyone!Host:Angenette Levy  https://twitter.com/Angenette5Guest:Dan Schorr https://x.com/danschorr/highlightsCRIME FIX PRODUCTION:Head of Social Media, YouTube - Bobby SzokeSocial Media Management - Vanessa BeinVideo Editing - Daniel CamachoGuest Booking - Alyssa Fisher & Diane KayeSTAY UP-TO-DATE WITH THE LAW&CRIME NETWORK:Watch Law&Crime Network on YouTubeTV: https://bit.ly/3td2e3yWhere To Watch Law&Crime Network: https://bit.ly/3akxLK5Sign Up For Law&Crime's Daily Newsletter: https://bit.ly/LawandCrimeNewsletterRead Fascinating Articles From Law&Crime Network: https://bit.ly/3td2IqoLAW&CRIME NETWORK SOCIAL MEDIA:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lawandcrime/Twitter: https://twitter.com/LawCrimeNetworkFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/lawandcrimeTwitch: https://www.twitch.tv/lawandcrimenetworkSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge all episodes of this Law & Crimes series ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. A choir teacher arrested again, accused of more sex crimes involving students. I'll tell you about the latest charges involving Eric Stearns and what his lawyer is saying about them. Welcome to Crime Fix. I'm Anjanette Levy.

Eric Stearns was a choir teacher at St. Helens High School in Oregon for many, many years. He was trusted, as all teachers are, to be around students, to teach them, and to keep them safe. But the Columbia County District Attorney says Stearns abused his position and used it to do things like touch the lips,

chest, and rear ends of the students who were around him. Police say they've been investigating Stearns for four months. He was first indicted in November on seven counts of sexual abuse in the second degree and one count of sexual abuse in the third degree. But it wasn't just Stearns who police arrested. A retired teacher named Mark Collins was also charged with crimes involving underage students between the years of 2017 and 2023. Students protested outside of St. Helens High School by walking out of class days after Stearns' arrest. A former student, Doug Weaver, had posted on TikTok about issues he said the school had had in the past with another teacher named Kyle Robleski who was convicted of sex charges in 2019. this particular school had a 3.5 million dollar

settlement for allegations that they know that students are in danger and they do nothing everybody knew I knew that Robleski was a risk to students in 2006. when I was in his history class one of my best friends was in that class with me, and we would always go work out in the hallway because she couldn't stand to be in the room with him. Everyone, everyone in that school knew. Now, Weaver's videos may have helped open the floodgates. I have had a ton of people sending me messages from the town I grew up in, telling me about things that teachers have done, things that teachers are doing,

things that staff members, administrators are doing. People are spilling tea left and right. Everything from students who graduated last year to former employees who were bullied out of their job, current employees at the school district who are afraid to speak up because they're afraid to lose their jobs. Parents who currently have kids in the school district there. And even some current students have been sending me messages. Weaver continued to follow the controversy following

Stearns' first arrest in November. Take a look at this. Two educators were arrested in the town I grew up in for sexual abuse. The next day, countless students and parents showed up at the board meeting and demanded answers. They wanted to know why none of this abuse was being reported and why one of these teachers was kept in the classroom even after they knew he was being investigated for sexual abuse. The board told the public that the police told them to keep him in the classroom and the police chief made it very clear that that was not true, that the officers who talked to them had their body cams on the whole time so they could prove that that was not a true statement.

Now, I reached out to the school district for a response on these latest allegations against Stearns. And at the time of this recording, I have not yet received a response. Last weekend, Stearns turned himself into police after a grand jury added additional charges, he now faces 13 counts of second-degree sexual abuse alleged to have occurred between the years of 2015 and 2023, five misdemeanor counts of third-degree sexual abuse in 2015, 2021, and 2022, and four counts of second-degree sexual abuse in 2023 and 2024. Eric Stearns has been a teacher for many years, so I decided to search him on truthfinder.com to see what I would find. Truthfinder is a massive public record search service. When I put in Stearns' name in the search engine, some old traffic violations

came up in the criminal and traffic search results, along with an old theft charge. Truthfinder is great because it will show you past and current addresses, phone numbers, relatives, and social media profiles. And one thing that I really love about it, it's also going to show you the names of sex offenders who live near you. So if you want to give it a try, you can get 50% off right now. Just log on to www.truthfinder.com slash lccrimefix. Log on and start accessing information about almost anyone.

Stearns appeared in court Monday and pleaded not guilty. Prosecutors asked that he be held without bail, but his lawyers said he's been free on bail already and should remain so. The new allegations are, it looks like 2022 and a student from this past year. But of note, the Measure 11 allegation, count 13, is alleging that essentially he touched the lips of someone that was intoxicated. That is actually the basis for the charge um it's that he um touched someone who was intoxicated lips um your honor knows and i know that that is i i don't know of any case law supporting such a accusation obviously the media and attention that this case has gotten makes it very hard for a grand jury to serve as a check on allegations. But I will also state that several of the sex abuse allegations deal with Mr. Stearns, who is a choir teacher,

touching the lymph nodes in the neck of students who reported that their throats were sore. So we don't necessarily have direct sexual intent in many of these. So I would ask the court to please take that into account as we are to consider the nature of the allegations. The judge decided to hold Eric Stearns without bail until a hearing on Friday. Stearns spoke briefly about not being able to reach his lawyer. I have no way to get in touch with my attorney during the day while I'm in detention. We only get one hour. My hour is after working hours. I'm only able to call her office number.

Her cell phone is restricted while here in the jail, so I'm unable to contact my attorney. Okay. Well, the sheriff's office that runs the jail will need to make accommodations so you can exercise your constitutional right to talk to your attorney during business hours. If there's a problem with that, contact Ms. Myrick when you can and let her know. And if the sheriff's office doesn't do that,

I'm going to have words with them because they can't violate your constitutional right to talk to an attorney. Yes, Your Honor. KGW reported last month that 10 St. Helens school district employees were on paid administrative leave, including staff at the elementary, middle, and high schools, as an internal investigation into sex abuse allegations widened. I spoke with St. Helens Police Chief Joseph Hogue about the investigation and whether Stearns could face more charges. You know, the information really hasn't stopped coming in. And so it's just a matter of getting information from both victims and witnesses on this case and presenting a case

to the grand jury. And we're not sure when it's going to stop. I do suspect that more information is going to keep coming in on this case even after the indictments last week. I also asked Chief Hogue about whether more charges could be coming for people other than Eric Stearns. There is some other investigations going on. We're just not at the stage, unlike the Ste sheer volume and, you know, of the information that's coming in. So eventually they'll be able to pivot to some other cases. But this one's kind of been the investigative priority right now. And what about that local news report that 10 employees of the district are on administrative leave? Well, I think we can all understand that every time somebody, regardless of where you work,

that you're on admin leave or you're being investigated, that doesn't always mean that there's a company in criminal case with that. So there very well could be that number of people on leave with the school district. Not all of those, at least at this point, have a criminal case to go along with it. I want to bring in former sex crimes prosecutor Dan Shore. So, Dan, it sounds like the investigation here is ongoing. We have a number of employees in the school district on paid leave. You know, the police are limited what they can say at this point in time, but the investigation keeps going and more information is coming in. So it sounds like more charges could be coming. It sounds like that from what we're seeing. And law enforcement usually doesn't reveal all their

cards at a time like this because they probably are reaching out to other witnesses to see what else they can learn. But in many cases where there are allegedly numerous victims, a big part of law enforcement's role is to figure out, are there others, are there people who are maybe concerned about coming forward because they're worried about retaliation or for some other reason they are not comfortable coming forward? But often these cases don't conclude just when you hear about the first indictment because there's ongoing investigation. It sounds like from everything we've heard, this was going on. I mean, the charges with Eric Stearns go back to 2015. But it sounds like this was going on before that with possibly other teachers, things of that nature. I mean, we have two teachers facing charges right now, Eric Stearns, and then the retired teacher, Mark Collins. What is going on in a school district that this is allowed to just go on for some time? Because it sounds like people probably knew,

or there at least were probably whispers. I mean, the kids knew, and other alumni of the school knew they're posting on TikTok about it. So what goes on in these schools? Is there just a culture of silence? You raise a lot of great points. I mean, first of all, those who are accused are obviously innocent until proven guilty. We'll see how that court case plays out. But there's a lot of people coming forward saying that they were experiencing sexual misconduct and some of it very serious. So I conduct a lot of investigations of sexual misconduct with educational institutions. And there's generally two parts of it. One is investigating what sex abuse might have happened. And then the other part of it is, why was it, if it did happen, why was it allowed to happen at an institution? Did people know about it? Was it reported and no one acted? Was there a culture that either encouraged it or failed to discourage people from conducting

themselves in a way that allowed sexual misconduct to happen? You have to look at policies and procedures, reporting. And that's a large part of an investigation like this. What were the failures of the school to not detect it or if they did detect it not to act on it earlier unfortunately we see this time and time again since the me too movement started where we see that people were reporting sexual misconduct to schools or companies and sometimes unfortunately there was no meaningful action and that can lead to someone being a perpetrator against other people in the future in the local news reporting um and I should reiterate that I reached out to the district, have not yet heard back.

But the local news reporting indicates that there are internal investigations underway within the school district. So they're looking into this. Obviously, there's a lot there. So they know they've got a problem, whether or not, you know, Eric Stearns is innocent until proven guilty. I mean, we've got two different things going on here. School district, looking into what's going on, and then the criminal investigations. So they know they've got a problem. I mean, they had the settlement from years back. So how do you root this out? Because, I mean, by all accounts, this is considered a massive scandal out there in St. Helens, Oregon. Right. And this is the type of work that I do every day.

I work largely with educational institutions investigating these types of matters. And the school has a legal and a moral obligation to investigate it on their own. But there are Title IX regulatory requirements when there is sexual misconduct alleged at their school to look into it on their own. Just because law enforcement is looking into something doesn't mean that school no longer has that obligation because they still have to find out if their policy procedures failed them. Why was this allowed to occur? So the school has to look into this, but it's important that hopefully they're using someone who is either external or somewhat independent of the school. So there's not either a bias or the appearance of a bias when they're investigating this. We need someone to really find out what the truth is at the school in a way that's not going to be influenced by whoever is in control of the school. Or there might just be a perception that someone

is reaching findings because that's what the school wants. And we want to make sure that those findings are independent. Yeah, most certainly, because if you're paying for the investigation, that's the concern that you can often pay to influence the results or get the results that you want. So hopefully they're taking care of this because they're just making themselves liable civilly. Think about that's going to come next. All of these victims are going to file civil suits. Right. And it's not just about them paying for the investigation.

Any investigation that's conducted is going to be paid for in one form or another, whether it's an employee or an external resource. But are they using a resource who is really independent? And there are many companies out there, mine is one of them, but there are many others that are independent, have a reputation for being independent. And that in a situation like this, ideally, that's what you want so that people recognize, okay, this person who investigated it, maybe they're a former prosecutor, maybe they have some other experience that they conduct independent investigations. Of course, you know, the school is going to end up paying whether it's an external person or an internal person, but it's extremely important that we find out and the school finds out why

this was allowed to occur and what warning signs there were. Many situations have reports that were ignored or people weren't discouraged from people were discouraged from reporting and that's very concerning it is very concerning and we're going to keep an eye on it because it sounds like it's not over and there will be more to come dan shore thank you so much as always great talking with you thanks for having me and that's it for this episode of crime fix i'm angie thanks so much for being with me i'll see you back here next time