Law&Crime Sidebar - TikToker Busts Teacher Who Thought He Was Chatting with Naked Teen

Episode Date: November 14, 2024

Kyle Morris, 31, was fired from his teaching job at a high school outside Sacramento after video of him allegedly trying to video chat with a teenager went viral. TikTok and YouTube star “RobtheMaster” was live streaming as he pretended to be a 15-year-old girl. Law&Crime’s Jesse Weber has details on the takedown with Sheriff Chris Swanson, head of Genesee County, Michigan’s predator catcher team.PLEASE SUPPORT THE SHOW: Download the FREE Upside App at https://upside.app.link/sidebar to get an extra 25 cents back for every gallon on your first tank of gas.HOST:Jesse Weber: https://twitter.com/jessecordweberLAW&CRIME SIDEBAR PRODUCTION:YouTube Management - Bobby SzokeVideo Editing - Michael Deininger and Christina FalconeScript Writing & Producing - Savannah Williamson & Juliana BattagliaGuest Booking - Alyssa Fisher & Diane KayeSocial Media Management - Vanessa BeinSTAY 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/lawandcrimenetworkTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lawandcrimeSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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will keep you on the edge of your seat. Don't let your fears take hold of you as you dive into this addictive series. Love thrillers with a paranormal twist? The entire Oracle trilogy is available on Audible. Listen now on Audible. Are you at like work? Yeah, I'm at work right now. Oh, that's cool, though. A TikToker pretending to be a 15-year-old girl started chatting with an older man online, and guess what? Turned out he was a California high school teacher. The whole thing was captured right on the content creator's live stream. We're going to dig into this story and the phenomenon of predator catching with someone who knows a thing or two about busting predators. Welcome to Sidebar, presented by Law and Crime.

I'm Jesse Weber. Last week, a streamer known as Rob the Master was doing a live stream while matching with people on an app known as Emerald Chat. Now, if you haven't heard of it, it's fine. I haven't heard of it either. but apparently it calls itself the new amigal, where it randomly matches you with someone online, and then you can video chat or message back and forth with complete strangers. So the days of the chat room are not gone.

They're still very much alive and well. So what happens? Well, Rob the Master, he does this a lot, apparently. His YouTube and TikTok page are full of videos where he uses a fake voice generator to essentially catfish alleged predators. He has more than 1 million followers on TikTok, nearly 100,000 on YouTube. And so last week, Rob, posing as a 15-year-old girl named Leah, starts chatting with someone

named Kyle. He says he's 31 years old. And Leah replies that she's 15 and asks if that's okay, as in, I'm underage. Should we continue talking? And Kyle replies back, I'm sure this is not a shocker. Yeah. So when Leah, Leah asks Kyle what brings him to the chat? he says he's bored and horny.

All right, can you talk about more red flags that are happening already? Leah responds, and remember, this is Rob, but Leah responds that she's also bored, and does he want to play a game of truth or dare? So Leah dares Kyle to send a picture of himself. And at that point, he asks if she has Snapchat, you know, an app where conversations disappear, although, by the way, they can still be found by law enforcement looking for evidence. And when Kyle asks for a photo of Leah, Rob finds a rampant. random photo online and sends it to him. And he sends another one when Kyle requests a full body

pick. Rob, again, remember, undercover is Leah, asked Kyle to turn on his video, which he does, and he tells her he's at work after hours. And Rob uses this fake voice generator to sound like a girl, but doesn't turn on his video, okay? So Kyle reveals that he lives in the Sacramento area and that he has a wife and a child. And by the way, everything he said is true. His name is Kyle. We'll talk about that in a minute. He has a wife and child. He is 31 years old. And then Kyle requests that Leah turn on her camera, right?

Seems only fair. And she tells him, or Rob tells him, that she just got out of the shower so she's not wearing any clothes. And she wants to know if that's okay. Does he still want her to turn on her camera? He says, shockingly, yes. And finally, it is time for the reveal. Okay, wait, where's your camera? I want your reaction to what you're going to.

what you're going to see ready all right can you count down just count down I don't know it's pretty random three to one oh too fast a little three wait wait I'm not ready I'm not ready I'm not ready I'm nervous I'm shy not yet okay not yet just give me one second okay I'm ready two one one oh good Lord bro Bro. That's gross. What? Yep.

Kyle quickly hangs up when he realizes what is going on. But remember, this was live. And Rob had thousands of people watching this chat. You know what happened? Apparently, current and former students immediately recognized Kyle because he is a teacher. And word quickly spread. Students started sharing this video with each other, commenting on that they knew this teacher, that he was chatting with the content creator from inside his classroom.

And it turns out Kyle was Kyle Morris, a teacher at Lincoln High School outside of Sacramento, California, again, 31 years old, married with a child. He taught media arts as part of the school's career pathway program. He also coached boys lacrosse and girls flag football teams at the school. By the way, I have to say, I think I spend about 80% of my day working on sidebar stories like this, and I'm constantly in a rush. I'm constantly working on this, and it's a great thing. We love doing it. But that day-to-day can be a lot. And we have this awesome app that we're now using. It's

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use our promo code sidebar and you'll get an extra 25 cents back on every gallon on your first tank of gas. Okay, but back to this. Western Placer Unified School District sent out an email about the video to families, letting them know that he was immediately placed on administrative leave. And a few days later, it was announced that he was officially fired. In a statement, Superintendent Kerry Callahan said, we do not condone inappropriate behavior from any adult in our community. And when serious concerns arise, we act swiftly. Our standard protocol is to place the individual on leave, remove them from the school environment, and conduct a thorough investigation in collaboration with law enforcement.

And to be clear, so far, there have been no word about any sort of criminal charges or investigation. But let's talk about this a little bit more. And I am joined by a special guest, Genesee County Sheriff Christopher Swanson, who worked alongside our sidebar regular over here. Chris Hansen on Predator Task Force operations. And Sheriff Swanson has been so generous with his time. He is actually on a cruise, right? You're on a cruise. You're on vacation. And you took the time to come here on sidebar as if this guy wasn't a hero as is, as if he's not the best there is. He does this for us. So thank you so much, sheriff, coming on. Thank you, brother. Appreciate you. So, I mean, this is a different one. What do you

make of it? Well, it's not uncommon that you have individuals who have no involvement of law enforcement involved in these kinds of situations. I tell you, in our ghost team, nine out of ten predators that we, as law enforcement catch, have never had even a traffic ticket. So it doesn't surprise me as a teacher. But what is unique about this whole thing, it was a live chat with a non-law enforcement entity that exposed a predator. And the question, the question, question is, what has he done before this moment? And what could we have stopped if law enforcement was involved? I find it so interesting how brazen he is, right? He gives out actual, his real name, where he lives, his age, he's married with a child, turns on the camera. Do you see that

often? I mean, you would think they realize what he has to realize what he's doing is wrong and potentially illegal. And yet gives out this personal information? We call that in the Midwest buck fever, where the dopamine drive in order for you to live your fantasy is greater than your common sense of what you're actually doing. And that's why they're so truthful, because they are brazen. They're doing it, he's doing it in his classroom. I mean, at any point does your conscience kick in and say, this is not right? And in this case, that's what shows even predators like him, how aggressive they are. And imagine how far this would have gone because he wasn't going to stop at a chat.

No question. Tell me, are you seeing with your investigations more suspects, more defendants, who are teachers, who are educators, those around children, or are they just generally speaking from all walks of life? And this just has to, it just happens to be another example of a teacher. So I have the first give some background. I created ghost, Genesis, human oppression strike team, which is now called global human a pressure strike team, May of 2018. I used to do international operations with an organization,

and that's how I got involved with Chris Hansen back in 2021. So I've been in this field, being in law enforcement 32 years, I see a trend all the time, whether it's narcotics or human trafficking or even financial crimes. But to your point, I have been able to see now over six years of different types of not only how we find predators, but how they operate. operate. And it is not uncommon, even from back then, to see people that are church leaders. These are teachers. These are grandparents. They're parents who drop their kids off at babysitters to come sex with our decoys. There is no boundaries by these individuals. I see a larger uptick with people that are non-technical because there's an easier access to get these

conversations, these fantasies, because we have apps now. And I was listening to your introduction. it's not in common to that they start on an app and they take it to a chat room or they take it to texting and phone to phone. There is an algorithm that predators use. The problem we have here is what did you really get by identifying this teacher when it comes to long-term accountability? Yeah, that escalation is incredibly troubling considering if it was, like you said, like really a 15-year-old girl. People, though, in that position from when you've had the opportunity to interview them and see these cases. Why do they do it? You know, there's one thing for people to leave their families. It's one thing to cheat on their spouses, but to go after underage children. I mean,

do you see a common thread in the cases you see? Fornography, hands down. I will tell you that majority of, and this is, this is why vigilante predator catchers like this individual, they do the work. take it the first base, rounding second, and the game's over. So nobody got this guy's phone. Nobody did a background. Nobody was able to hold him account. Nobody got a confession. It was a, it was a live, you know, video bit. But what we found is when we get those phones and when we do the confessions, it's not a matter of what happened. We know what happened. We have the software that we have all the chats. We have all the probable cause to charge. But that interview is so important because we find out what was the start. And we try.

it back 99% of the time through the addiction of pornography. It desensitizes the ability. It goes deeper and deeper in the fantasy world. The dopamine drive is just like an addiction. It's never like the first time. And then they start testing and they start going a little bit farther and a little bit farther. And then eventually you want to act out because you're not getting that release that you once used to get. That's what we find.

You ask for a common trend. It's the addiction of pornography. Do you talking about this, you mentioned something? thing. If you were the sheriff in this county, would you be able to open up an investigation into this guy? What would be the next steps? What would you be looking for? So because it's such high profile and he is a teacher, I would absolutely go and try to make contact. But to charge this individual, and I don't know California crime, but I can tell you in Michigan and probably in California, there is a trail of evidence that you need for probable

cause in order to get some type of charges. The evidence that was gathered, in this chat, but the testing of the evidence and the path in which it came from is not credible. You know, you're not going to be able to take a YouTuber or somebody who's got a social media influence platform and say, well, we're going to use this in order to charge the individual because there's no crime that's committed in the presence of law enforcement. And that's very difficult, which is, again, my concern with vigilante predators. What is the intention behind it? I would much rather this individual say, you know what, I've got a great platform. When I get somebody. I have an immediate member of law enforcement that I'm going to work with. We use them

all the time called confidential informants. Then you can take what you're doing, add it to what we get to do, and now there's full accountability. I do that with Chris Hanson. Chris is embedded right with us. He's there taking confessions. We don't use them against them, but we use that platform that we have to help his platform. So I will tell you that I think it's very unlikely he'll ever be charged. In Michigan, the question is, what's the crime? He said, he's, you know, he's bored and horny. Well, unfortunately, you know, there's laws that you have to meet these variables. And I'm not quite convinced that that met the variable. And it was stopped. As soon as he was identified, we would not have stopped. We would have continued that

investigation in order for him to come to an operation. We'd have chatted this dude for three weeks if we had it to. The key is to get him accountable by knocking on that door and then opening up all what we could maybe find. But in this case, it was stopped shortly after he was exposed. Yeah, there was not a further act taken. And look, I was going to ask you if this frustrates you, seeing amateur predator catchers do this because, you know, on one hand, it is exposing what this guy did. He just got fired. It's humiliating. But the justice system, he's not a part of that. And let's say this is, he is a danger to society. And could he potentially do this to somebody else if he wasn't arrested? So that frustration, I was going to ask you about seeing more people. Because I also see, I see not only Rob the Master, but I see people on social media apps, they go up to suspected predators and they film them with their phones and they set up their own kind of sting operations, but police are not involved. And I didn't know if that was a source of frustration for you. Yeah, that's you bring up an excellent point.

There's the, uh, the court of public opinion, which clearly he was convicted and will never, ever come to recover that. Then there's the court of law and order in order for this long term accountability to take place. The frustration comes when, and we just had this in our community, we had a vigilante predator group, and when they confronted the individual in the public street, the one that was doing, the actual communicating, grabbed on to the individual, not wanting to let him go. That individual now has been assaulted by somebody who's not from law enforcement. Now we have this complication as to, why did you grab me? You're not even part of law enforcement. And it just

muddies the water. The frustration comes for another layer that many people don't think about. As a ghost founder and commander, when we do these cases and we expose the individuals, can I tell you many times that exposure brings real victims that have never had their voice heard, that now we're able to say, hey, you are protected, you have law enforcement, we're going to wrap our arms around you, we're going to take you from victim status to now tell your story and now you're in survivor status. Rob the master is not able to do that. law enforcement is. And so again, the frustration comes because I know it's like, you know, catching a big fish and the line breaks before you get it to the net. That's the frustration.

Are they identifying them? Absolutely. Is it the best way to do it? Absolutely not. And before I let you go, because I want you to get back to your vacation because you deserve it, I did want to ask you about one more thing. I want to talk to a little bit about this Emerald Chat because this is not the first time that it has been highlighted in recent years as a platform for alleged predatory behavior. We go back to 2021. There was this 14-year-old girl named Savannah Childress. She disappeared from her North Carolina home, and investigators found out that she had been kidnapped. And she had reportedly been in contact with a man named William Ice through Emerald Chat on her school-issued laptop. Law enforcement all over the country was notified,

including the FBI, the U.S. Marshal Service. Now, thankfully, 10 days later, officers in Arkansas, they spotted his SUV at McDonald's. Savannah was able to get out of the car to safety. ICE got into a shootout with police. He took off. He ended up taking his own life before law enforcement could ultimately apprehend him. And he was also wanted out of Pennsylvania in connection with other child predator cases. Savannah was returned back home. So a really, really scary situation.

Could have ended up a lot worse. But that's the nightmare situation. You meet somebody on one of these platforms. You get kidnapped. I mean, talk to me about the dangers of this kind of platform. And if you have parents watching right now, what would you advise them to do? You're communicating with me on a phone. This phone is now the creepy white van that we were told about growing up.

Parents need to realize that that phone and that portal opens up an unlimited availability of doors that can be opened, and many of them are dangerous. Emerald Chat is just a platform. We use kick, skip the games. We arrested Peter Padgick, who was from Florida that came to Michigan, and then went back to Florida after he convinced a female. victim to jump out of her house, meet him at a motel. He checked her for four hours, monetized the whole thing, dropped their back off. Then by the time we caught him in Broward County, you've been to Washington and Oregon within a 10-day period. The first victim he communicated with was 12 years old, and he just sent her a simple Instagram direct message. Everybody uses

Instagram. So it's not these weird, crazy apps. That's what parents need to realize. These are very benign apps. If there's a portal to communicate, a predator will find it and they will use it. And they target their victims. They groom their victims. They isolate their victims. And ultimately, they control their victims. That's what they do. It's as much as any other predator that you see out there. And again, your kid's business is your business. It's incredibly well said. Sheriff Swanson, I really, really appreciate you taking the time on your vacation to come talk to us about this. I love your insight. And I have to also say once again, thank you so much for the work that you do. I mean, really, you guys are incredible. So thank you so much. Great having

you on. And enjoy the rest of your vacation. You deserve it, Sheriff. Thank you so much. No vacation from predator hunting. Have a great day. All right, everybody. That's all we have for you right now here on Sidebar. Thank you so much for joining us. And as always, please subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jesse Weber. I'll speak to you next time. You can binge all episodes of this law and crime series ad free right now on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.