Posted on 02/05/2006 12:41:25 PM PST by DBeers
Middletown - It's nearly five years since a relationship developed between Middletown School District Superintendent Robert Sigler and the 14-year-old boy he would come to molest.
Sigler is serving time in prison for a crime that destroyed lives and rocked Middletown to its core. And the boy has come of age. He's now a young man of 18, who feels he has finally won a long, hideous battle to retrieve his life. He has friends, a job, and he's free of the cocktail of medications that had swallowed him for years.
But there are things, he believes, that still need to be said, and school district employees that he believes have yet to be held accountable for enabling Sigler to continue the relationship.
Here is his story:
"I didn't understand," says the victim, "that when the superintendent gives you a hug and it's - as a lawyer phrased it - warmer than it should be, that's your cue to run for the hills."
How it started
The boy was in seventh grade at Twin Towers Middle School, and he was having a problem. A janitor, he says, was abusive toward him, and the school administrator was not taking his complaints seriously.
So the boy - who was both mentally and emotionally disabled, according, he says, to his school classification - went to see the superintendent. But he didn't like the excessively warm reception he received. He did not return to see Sigler again until he was in eighth grade and his problems had persisted.
"It was in front of the building," the victim says. "(Sigler)'s with several other people smack in front of the door. He gives me a hug - what the ADA (assistant district attorney) would call a warm hug. And he invited me into his office, asked me why I'd been so distant over the last year.
"I told him I was busy, had stuff to do. But, of course, I didn't say 'You freaked me out,' because you don't alienate your only ally in a district this powerful."
Sigler asked him to dinner. Red Lobster, he thinks. Or maybe Ground Round. They went out a lot.
Sigler frequently took the boy out of school. He bought him presents, paid for Christmas. Gave his family a $500 gift card to Stop & Shop after his mother left - "I mentioned we were broke and starving," he says.
"The sick thing is, all of my teachers knew about it. They'd ask me about it," he says, "that we'd been hanging out outside of school; that I was at his house. They knew he was bringing me things."
The boy became a familiar face around the school district building.* He wandered in without signing in, and other administrators came to know him by name.
Inside Sigler's office, the boy would sit with him at the computer. Sometimes, "there was inappropriate stuff he wanted to show me." Other times, Sigler would ask him "to make the hard drives unusable" in order to remove the evidence.
There was "child pornography, bestiality, lesbian porn, some gay porn; movies, pictures, stories."
Still, other times, the two would review school records.
"I had access to his e-mail account, to student records, to student arbitration. He would show me: 'Here's a student who's been suspended, and here's the decision I've reached.'
"I knew about what was going on in negotiations with the teachers' union. I knew about their contracts."
"He told him a lot of stuff," adds the boy's father, "showed him confidential files."
"His concept was that we had an open and honest relationship," the victim says. "I think he was really sick. He really thought he was my mentor."
"At first, it was an actual friendship, a nonsexual relationship. To quote one of my therapists, he groomed me. It's a practice commonly used with serial pedophiles to gain the trust of the victims and to get the victims to look up to them. And when the time is right, they make their move. That's what he did."
In Middletown High School
By the time the boy reached high school in the fall of 2001, the nature of the relationship had changed. He was spending time at Sigler's home. Sigler was buying him clothing and underwear, electronic gadgets and jewelry - "really expensive things."
"The attachment started before sex. If you needed anything, go to him - a matter of school, money, anything. I had the four-digit code to his garage. He would encourage me to walk up to his house in the morning to have breakfast.
"His wife was not very fond of this in the beginning. ... He told me they fought about it, that she didn't understand he was trying to help."
Shortly after the boy's mother left, Sigler made his first pass at the boy. The boy turned him down, "but that was not good enough," he says. Sigler just turned on the pressure.
"He would say, 'Remember how (I) bought you all these clothes? What are you going to do for me now?'" the boy's father says.
Sigler told him: "Just because you ride a horse, it doesn't make you a cowboy," the victim says. He knew what it meant: performing certain acts would not make him homosexual.
Suspicions around the high school were swirling. People talked about Sigler and the kid. Principal Bernie Cohen grew more and more vocal about his concerns.* And other faculty members, not knowing what to do, joked about it - or that's the way it felt to the boy.
"That's how they looked at it, as a joke," the victim says. "On the one side: 'We don't know what to do, so let's laugh about it.' On the other side: 'This is pretty pathetic, so let's laugh.'"
"The only person who lifted a hand has been turned into a martyr and has been fighting for his job," the boy says of Cohen. "I would like to thank him. He pulled me off to the side commonly and asked me about my relationship with Sigler. But I was too scared to say anything."
"If one person had done that, saw what was going on and said, 'you know, maybe I can't do anything, but I can tell someone,' maybe I wouldn't have gotten PTSD, night terrors, sweats."
How it finally ended
The relationship continued through the spring of 2002, when the boy's father became uncomfortable with the attention Sigler was showering on the boy.
What the boy didn't know was that in April, school board President Paul Johnson had sent a letter to Sigler, telling him to "cease and desist" all contact with the boy.
Also that spring, the boy was detained after an incident at the high school and taken to Arden Hill hospital for psychiatric evaluation. The boy and his father believe the district was hoping the boy would reveal the nature of Sigler's relationship with him, so that no one would have to stick his or her own neck out and report Sigler.
He didn't. And the relationship continued.
Despite protests from Sigler - "He said (BOCES) would be a nightmare without his protection" - the boy decided to transfer to BOCES in the fall of 2002.
Before finalizing his decision, the boy went for a tour of BOCES with a district administrator who arranged to pick him up. That administrator, says the victim, was Selena Fischer, who was in charge of special education. At the last minute, the boy's father, who by then was suspicious of Sigler's attentions toward his son, decided to join them on the tour.
"She said she was going to take me, when she was actually going to pick up Sigler at his office," he says of Fischer. "But my father didn't fall for it, thank God."
At BOCES, contact between the boy and Sigler was negligible. But early in the semester, the boy received a telephone call. It was Selena Fischer, he says. She put Sigler on the phone.
Again, unbeknownst to the boy, Sigler had been warned in a letter from then-school board President Robin Markovits to have no contact with the boy.*
Then, one night in January 2003, the boy couldn't settle down.
"I couldn't sleep," he says. "I just snapped. I just told my therapist out of the blue. I started crying about the other possibilities, the other children."
Police moved in on Jan. 3, 2003. Eighteen months after school district Superintendent Robert Sigler began preying on a 14-year-old boy, he was arrested.
"It was just so wrenching that for the longest time, I didn't want to be a member of the living. It took me four and a half years to feel OK about myself. I hated myself for four long years."
Recovering
Robert Sigler was indicted and pleaded guilty to at least four instances of sodomy with the boy.
Meanwhile, the Orange County District Attorney's Office convened a special grand jury to investigate the two years of unspeakable acts in the Middletown School District.
The grand jury sat for nearly a year, hearing testimony from dozens of witnesses and reviewing thousands of pages of documents. On Nov. 21, 2003, it issued a damning report. It found a pervasive code of silence and turn-the-other-cheek in a district that saw the warning signs but chose to believe the worst was not occurring when it was.
The report was thorough, outlining the history of events between Sigler and his victim as they unfolded. But it named no names and gave immunity to anyone who testified.
As the boy tried to pick up the pieces of his life, he fumed at what he saw as a blatant disregard for accountability.
"What purpose did it serve to have a grand jury investigation if everyone was given immunity from prosecution?" he says. "The grand jury became nothing more than a Salem witch trial. It should have been a forum for answers and action."
He spent the next few years so high on medications that he would frequently lose consciousness and so filled with fury that he could not see forward.
"I was so angry and guilt-ridden: Look what I did to my family," he says. "My sister went through hell in the school district. My grandmother spent a lot of time bawling her eyes out."
The boy and his family sued Sigler. And they sued the school district, asking for $69 million. But the depositions were tortuous and the proceedings went on for too long. And the district, he says, was never going to "admit their mistakes."
"The board didn't even so much as apologize to me, not publicly and not privately, not even through their attorneys or a memo," he says. "Because they weren't sorry."
He grew more despondent.
"I stopped caring about everything for a very long time. ... I was not just abused, I was turned into a monster. I became filled with negative emotions like anger, hate, pain and rage. I became focused on their demise instead of moving forward. I wanted them to pay with their lives because I had paid with my life."
Finally, seeing no way out, the boy had himself committed.
"I had to commit myself. I was positive I would not have lived."
When he came home, he finally began to wean off the drugs. He was in withdrawal and would vomit all the time. He suffered from nervous disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder.
To this day, he still has night terrors.
"My sister and my dad would run into the room," he says. "I would be screaming, 'Get away from me.'"
Last year, unable to move on with his life, the boy settled with the school district, accepting a deal that he says amounted to a payment of less than a million dollars.
He was never going to see justice, he says. But maybe he could rejoin the living.
"My attitude now is a powerful play goes on, and I get to contribute a verse," he says.
"My major goal is moving on," he adds. "And I'd like people to know as much as they can. ... I hope if anything is achieved by this, it is a safer environment for kids and teens who attend that school, that questions are answered, and something like this never happens again."
*Taken from testimony in the Nov. 21, 2003, grand jury investigation report and testimony given during the disciplinary hearing of former Middletown High School Principal Bernie Cohen.
Wait, I thought it was every 14-year-old boy's dream to have a sexual relationship with one of his teachers. No pictures of the perp for us to drool over? :-p
Immunity was the goal all along.
Heart wrenching! This poor kid and millions, I fear, just like him, are victims of the public school system and what it has become.
When will action be taken to get the real "safety" issues back into schools. In many states, student enrollment numbers are down up to 30 percent. In CA they have had to close some schools for lack of enrollment. One has to wonder, what it's going to take to wake up the powers that can, but won't, stop this insanity.
Not with a male teacher.
Terribly sad and disappointing that even one child has to go through something such as this. He's smart enough to know that there are likely to be other victims so the child (now young adult) was more capable all along than he was being given credit for...even though there were some "intersted" adults that no adults persevered adequately to protect him. This is really an example of how the best intentions (with the exception of the predator's) went horribly wrong.
The boy/young man seems to have received excellent helps, however, as to recovery and I only hope he gets involved and soon with a Christian church.
Some of his anger should be towards his father.
IMO
One point in this child's favor regarding what recovery is possible is that he knows he took action against the predator. -- In a healing way his action can psychologically move him from victim to victor status... Unfortunately many children do not have the courage and or do not have the opportunity to confront the scum that stole their innocence...
--They often suffer silently ESPECIALLY when the sexual abuse is considered a politically correct right of passage for gender and or orientation questioning adolescents - a right of passage that homosexual predators are all too happy to 'help' adolescents engage in.
-- ALL this aggressively lobbied for by homosexual activists that now have recruiting 'clubs' in public schools...
Yup -there is no homosexual agenda... /sarcasm off
Huh?
Well, if we had a Supreme Court full of Ginsburgs this wouldn't be
a problem...there'd be a age of consent of 12.
Well -society has generally regarded children as being weak and vulnerable and civil laws have always reflected this accepted fact. It is only in recent history that conventional wisdom is being questioned by activist groups and overturned by judicial activists using moral relative argument bolstered by junk science to do it. Of course children are curious -children have always been curious; regardless, society and or adults should protect children --EVEN very weak and very curious children...
This boy has got to write a book and get Oprah to pitch it for him on her fabulous show!!
No, it's not a practice used by serial pedophiles,it is a standard practice used by many homosexual predators seeking to satisfy their quest for youth and beauty and to recruit more males into their ranks. As we know they do not naturally reproduce.
The mental health community,the main stream media and the school system do not want the average American to know how active,oppurtunistic,aggressive and pervasive the homosexual community is.
Seems I've encountered something like this before, though one does not need to experience something like this in order to sympathize.
School district is taking the same tact as the Church.... pay off, shrug and not address the problem....
Predatory, Homosexual pederasts.....
Interesting. Your idea just gave me an idea.
Yes, completely agreed...thanks for expressing what I'd have wanted to had I not been so completely exhausted earlier.
It would be really helpful to our fellow men/women and especially to our children to remain firm and consistent about this, that there is very much so this thing that we refer to as "the Homosexual Agenda" and that every individual both has the inherent right and abilities required to confront it as necessary.
There is terrible coercion involved in the Homosexual Agenda and most adults with enough life experience are aware of that through stories of recruitment and predation just as this one. And most of us know what the trust and vulnerability is in the psychology of most children...and that this one child here, this story, who was evaluated as being of lesser abilities than normal could know he was being misled and then also recover as he has to go on to confront from a point of self control of the situation is heroic, even.
I think this child/now young adult is a real hero. The man who predated upon his is the ultimate coward, the ultimate abnormal individual, truly a sick person.
I'm wondering who predated upon HIM, however, and how many other predators were created just by this same process...
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