A Florida teacher’s sexual encounter with a 15-year-old student was captured on cell phone video, according to authorities.
Doral Police arrested Desiree Cartin Rodriguez, 27, on Friday and charged her with two counts of lewd and lascivious battery, ABC affiliate WPLG reported.
Police said an anonymous email sent to an employee at Doral Academy Preparatory School in Miami-Dade County, where Rodriguez is employed, tipped them off to the relationship.
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Investigators spoke with the victim, who told them he’d been having sex with Rodriguez since Aug. 2019.
The student told police he and the teacher had kissed in her classroom during lunch on two occasions.
Rodriguez also picked the student up from his home so they could have sex, according to the victim.
The 15-year-old teen also said a cell phone video existed of Rodriguez performing oral sex on him.
Detectives who reviewed the cell phone video, which was provided to them by the victim, confirmed it depicted the student and Rodriguez engaging in sex.
Rodriguez admitted to the relationship when interviewed by police.
She is being held at Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center on a $7,500 bond, the Miami Herald reported.
Doral Academy Preparatory School has removed references to Rodriguez from its website.
Earlier this month, a Miami-Dade area high school teacher resigned amid a police investigation into allegations she had sex with an adult student.
A 2017 study published by the U.S. Justice Department found that women account for a large and growing minority of the sexual abuse committed by educators against students nationwide.
Psychologist Anna Salter, an expert on sexual predators, said in a 2013 study that women who sexually target students are typically married mothers in their mid-30s.
“They think they love the children,” she explained.
Charol Shakeshaft, an education professor at Virginia Commonwealth University who led the research, said these women are known as “opportunistic abusers.”
“[They] tend to spend a lot of time around groups of students, talking with them, going to the same places they go, and trying to blend in,” she said. “They are the teachers who want to be seen as hip or cool and who want the students to think they are part of the student peer group.”