The Child Protection eNewsletter

Texas District has third teacher arrested in four months…

For the third time this school year, a Texas school district is assuring parents that their children are safe after a teacher was arrested and charged with sexually assaulting a student. Read More

In the latest incident, Shannon Hrozek, 42, of Houston, was charged with sexual abuse of a child after police say a co-worker caught her performing oral sex on a 16-year-old boy inside a dark, locked classroom at Westfield High School.

Hrozek's arrest comes less than a month after Carlos Hector Valencia, another Westfield teacher, was accused by an 18-year-old girl of inappropriate touching inside a campus barn where the school houses livestock. The alleged incident took place in November. Valencia, a Spanish teacher, will be arraigned later this month.

In October, 33-year-old Alison Mosbeck, a teacher at Dueitt Middle School, was arrested and charged with three counts of sexual abuse of a child and having an improper teacher relationship with a student. Mosbeck allegedly began a relationship with a boy after initially asking him where she could buy some marijuana, according to a court affidavit. She brought him to a festival, where a sexual relationship began.

Both schools are part of the Spring Independent School District, which serves about 32,000 students in Harris County, a suburb of Houston. The school district, described as among the fastest growing in Texas, has about 5,000 employees, the majority of them teachers.

But the size of the district hardly justifies the spate of incidents, school officials said, even if they are isolated. "It happening one time isn't acceptable," Regina Curry, a spokeswoman for the school district, told ABC News. "Certainly happening three times is not acceptable."

Teenage boy in Norway was woman on the run…

A student in Norway who posed as a 13-year-old boy turned out to be a 33-year-old woman on the run from police investigating a child abuse case in the Czech Republic, Norwegian media reported. Read More

Barbora Skrlova duped Norwegian police, classmates, child care workers and teachers for four months into believing she was a teenage boy named "Adam,” daily Dagbladet reported.

"Looking back, we can say that we wondered about "Adam's" behavior. But this is not easy to know. Children at this age are very different, and can be masculine or feminine," Ingjerd Eriksen, principal at Marienlyst school in Oslo where the woman was a student, told Dagbladet.

The case, involving a sect suspected of abusing children, came to light in the Czech Republic last year and has been front-page material for the country's media for eight months. Picture courtesy Read More

Skrlova, alias "Adam," is a key figure in the case and has been on the run since, though Czech police have said it is not clear whether she is an accomplice, a witness or a victim.

Skrlova was first linked to the case when Czech police raided a house where they found an abused 8-year-old boy, two adult women and Skrlova, who at the time posed as a 13-year-old girl.

She was sent to an orphanage from which she later escaped because she did not want to testify against members of the sect, Dagbladet said.

Last year convicted sex offender Neil Rodreick was discovered posing as a 7th-grader in Arizona Volume 5, Issue 6, Volume 5, Issue 10, Volume 5, Issue 16

U. S. Marshals find four dead children in D. C. home…

As U.S. marshals armed with eviction papers began to clear out her Washington, D. C. town house, Benita Jacks sat on the steps leading to the upstairs bedrooms, intending to block their path, authorities said. Read More

One managed to sidestep the 33-year-old woman and spotted the bodies of three children on the floor of an unfinished bedroom, prosecutors said. He then opened the door to another bedroom and found the body of a teenager on the floor of the bare room.

Authorities estimate the four girls -- ages 5 to 17 -- had been dead for at least two weeks. Jacks told police they were "possessed by demons" and had died in their sleep, one by one, within a week of each other, court documents say. The charging documents identify the children as Brittany Jacks, 17; Tatianna Jacks, 11; N'Kiah Fogle, 6; and Aja Fogle, 5.

Jacks was charged with four counts of first-degree murder. She could receive a maximum sentence of life in prison if convicted.

"I don't think anyone in the city can remember a case involving this many young people who have died in such a tragic way," D. C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty said.

Jacks told police the deaths occurred before a utility turned off her electricity, which prosecutors said was in September. She told investigators she had not fed her children for a substantial time before their deaths.

City officials were scrambling to understand how four children could have been dead for at least two weeks without anyone knowing. The mayor said officials were working to determine what other contacts city agencies had with the family.

"We are going to investigate every single contact that this family has had with the government, with people who are paid to look out for the welfare of children, and we will come back with a full report," Fenty said.

Nona Richardson, a spokeswoman for the D.C. Public Charter School Board, said Jacks' three younger daughters attended the Meridian Public Charter School in Washington consistently until March. When they stopped showing up, the school immediately tried to contact the mother by mail and telephone, Richardson said. Officials finally went to the woman's home and were told that she wanted to withdraw the children and home-school them. They were officially withdrawn in mid-March.

The D.C. Child and Family Services agency tried last year to investigate a complaint about the family. But investigators could not make face-to-face contact with family members and believed they had moved to Maryland, agency spokeswoman Mindy Good said.

Norris West, a spokesman for the Maryland Department of Human Resources, said D.C. officials in June asked social services officials in Charles County, Maryland, to open a case for the family. However, county officials were not able to locate the family, and it is unclear whether they had actually moved to Charles County, West said.

In other news…

The international hunt for missing British girl Madeleine McCann took several new twists as the investigation appeared to focus more tightly on her parents. Portuguese police moved closer to charging the parents Kate and Gerry McCann after demanding the mother's diary be seized as trial evidence. Read More Madeleine, 3, disappeared from a room in a Portuguese holiday resort in May while her parents dined at a nearby restaurant. (See Volume 5, Issue 34, Volume 5, Issue 35, Volume 5, Issue 59, Volume 5, Issue 61, Volume 5, Issue 63) Blood found in a car hired by her parents weeks after she disappeared definitely came from the British girl, it was reported. The Portuguese newspaper Correio da Manha cited police sources as saying new tests on blood found in the hire car conclusively showed it was Madeleine's. "The definitive result of the tests leave no doubts for the Policia Judiciaria. The blood found in the McCanns' car is that of Madeleine as well as those samples detected in the flat," the paper said.

A man accused of tossing his four young children off an Alabama coastal bridge to their deaths denies killing them and says police harassed him into making a false confession, his attorney said. Read More Authorities say Lam Luong confessed to killing the children, ranging in age from a few months to 3 years, a day after reporting them missing and claiming a woman had taken them. But Luong's appointed attorney, Joe Kulakowski, said his client told him he falsely confessed under pressure after being questioned Monday night and the entire day Tuesday. Based in part on a witness's account, investigators said the four children were thrown from the highest part of the two-lane Dauphin Island bridge, a point about 80 feet above the Intracoastal Waterway. Luong had had an argument with his wife earlier, authorities said.

About 3.1 million people between the ages of 12 to 25 -- or about 5 percent of the age group -- have used over-the-counter cough and cold medicine to get high, a U.S. government survey found. Read More In large doses, cough syrups and cold pills can be used to induce hallucinations, “out-of-body” experiences or other effects, officials said. In recent years, the Drug Enforcement Administration has cited the rising popularity of cough syrup cocktails -- prescription codeine-laced cold medicine mixed with soda or sports drinks. With names like "Syrup," "Purple Drank" and "Lean," these concoctions first gained fame in Southern rap circles. As the trend spread to fans, teens started using the more readily available over-the-counter versions of cough suppressants.

Police said a 16-year-old Pennsylvania boy brought a knife to Greensburg Salem High School after threatening to kill his ex-girlfriend in a poem posted on his MySpace.com page. Read More Greensburg police Chief Wally Lyons said the threats were included in a poem titled "Why Would This Girl I Love Carry Me to Murder." The poem read, "I went to the hardware store to buy a four foot axe… Imma put it in her back. We both had our chances, I never gave up, but now, because of what she did, she's *expletive* out of luck." Police said the 17-year-old girl saw the poem and told school officials. "They had been dating for about six months and broke up," said Lyons. "Apparently, he didn't want to break up. He kept harassing her, bothering her, trying to get back together. When she refused, he wrote this poem on his MySpace page."

A Louisiana man was arrested after allegedly engaging in a sexual act with a young teen on a school bus. Brandon J. Bass, 20, was arrested on charges of aggravated oral sexual battery with a child. Read More Bass allegedly engaged in a sexual encounter with a 13-year-old female on a Tensas Parish school bus as it traveled through Concordia Parish, according to Concordia Parish Sheriff’s Office School Resource Officer Lee Ford. Several students on the bus reportedly witnessed the incident and notified their parents, who in turn notified authorities, CPSO Public Information Officer Kathleen Stevens said.

A 31-year-old paramedic from Rotterdam, NY has been arrested for sexually abusing a 4-year-old child, police announced. Read More David Harnett was arrested on charges of predatory sexual assault against a child and first-degree rape. The abuse did not occur while Harnett was on duty, police say. Police say the victim told her mother about the alleged abuse. The mother took the child to the hospital, where Child Protective Services was alerted to the case. Child Protective Services in turn contacted Rotterdam police, who launched an investigation.

For the last 15 years, Internet service providers have acted -- to use an old cliche -- as wide-open information super-highways, letting data flow uninterrupted and unimpeded between users and the Internet. Read More But ISPs may be about to embrace a new metaphor: traffic cop. At a small panel discussion about digital piracy at NBC’s booth on the Consumer Electronics Show floor, representatives from NBC, Microsoft, several digital filtering companies and the telecom giant AT&T said the time was right to start filtering for copyrighted content at the network level. Editor’s Note: If they can scan digital images for copyrighted material, why can’t they scan for child porn?

*for access to member only sites like the New York Times, use the ID "JohnDoeID" and the password "whatever". On sites asking for an email address, feel free to use "info@childprotectionprogram.org"