The tiny Virginia faculty district that’s been rocked by still-missing soccer coach Travis Turner’s youngster intercourse scandal has employed accused pedophile lecturers earlier than — together with a center faculty band director who deliberate to share images of scholars with creepo mates on-line.
Three different Smart County Public Colleges lecturers — together with two who have been later convicted — confronted fees of kid intercourse crimes over the previous 5 years alone earlier than Travis’ case got here to gentle, The Submit has realized.
The tight-knit, football-loving neighborhood was thrust into the nationwide highlight simply earlier than Thanksgiving, when Turner, the championship-winning Central Excessive College coach and married father, disappeared amid a toddler porn and solicitation of a minor probe.
However predators preying on schoolchildren aren’t any strangers to the county, which is house to five,500 college students throughout 13 faculties. And a few have gotten away with wrist-slap punishments.
Amongst them was Dalton Matthew Bates, a band chief at Smart County’s LF Addington Center College and Union Excessive College who was arrested in 2020 after being caught plotting with a pedo pal to share snaps of his younger college students.
“I simply received a job instructing center faculty so I’m gonna be making an attempt to withstand temptation,” Bates, then 23, wrote a fellow sicko on Snapchat that yr, the Mountain Eagle reported.
“Hopefully I can get pics of scholars by way of my pretend account and I’ll ship u,” he added.
Bates was charged with 20 counts of possessing youngster pornography, however two years later pleaded responsible to only 10 counts and was sentenced to 2 1/2 years per depend — however the years have been to be served concurrently and he was credited with time served, which means he was out quickly after confessing his crimes.
Then in 2023, Timothy Lee Meador — a coach and trainer at Union Excessive in Massive Stone Hole, the place Turner led the soccer staff — pleaded responsible to youngster solicitation and indecent liberties.
Meador, then 28, spent simply over a yr in jail.
And as lately as August, Coeburn Center College trainer Tyler Jay Tibbs was charged with three counts of carnal information — which generally entails sexual activity with a child aged 13 to fifteen — together with taking indecent liberties with a toddler by an individual in a supervisory relationship.
Tibbs, 28, was freed on $25,000 bond inside weeks, WCYB reported.
Turner, 46, was charged two months later. He coached and taught at Union Excessive College for greater than 10 years after becoming a member of in 2011, and coached a women’ softball staff elsewhere earlier than that.
The previous “Coach of the Yr” vanished into the Appalachian woods with a gun whereas cops have been on the best way to query him, and there’s been no hint of him since — regardless of a large manhunt by way of the rugged wilderness.
Police have offered no substantive updates since his disappearance.
However neighborhood members unloaded on the Smart County faculty board at a gathering Monday evening — with one dad or mum rattling off the names of previous intercourse pests the district has lately employed.
“When there’s this a lot abuse, it’s not just some unhealthy apples. It’s a tradition. The fish rots from the pinnacle down,” mentioned dad or mum Stephen Murray in a sentiment echoed by many on the assembly, which was the primary permitting public remark since Turner vanished.
“That is simply the instances which have been reported and charged,” Murray famous.
Murray additionally learn an announcement he mentioned was from the lady Turner allegedly victimized, who mentioned she initially felt like she “was the issue.”
“I didn’t really feel like a sufferer,” the assertion learn, in keeping with the TimesNews.
“I felt like I used to be the issue. I felt like I had embarrassed the college, broken the fame of the teaching workers and disrupted one thing I used to be supposed to guard as an alternative of myself.”
However a person claiming to be her grandfather additionally spoke and mentioned he was happy with her for coming ahead — saying she saved others from hurt together with her bravery.
Smart County College District didn’t reply to request for remark.
