A Texas middle school teacher charged with sexually assaulting an eighth-grade student may lose her freedom and nearly $30,000 police said she paid the teenager for his silence.
Thao “Sandy” Doan, 27, a math teacher at Raul Quintanilla Senior Middle School in West Oak Cliff, was charged Friday with last year’s sexual assault of a student, who was 14 at the time. Doan was freed on $25,000 bond.
According to an affidavit for a search warrant obtained by the Dallas Morning News, Doan was making massive blackmail payments to the teen to buy his silence. The scheme fell apart when the teen’s mother found a disturbing text message on her son’s cellphone. The Dallas Independent School District Police Department began investigating this month.
“He received a message from the teacher that morning, saying, ‘I’ll be at a meeting until 11 o’clock and I’ll drop off the money to the address you told me to,’” the student’s mother, who asked not to be identified, told Fort Worth’s CBS 11 News.
The mysterious message, along with the mother’s impression that her son suddenly had a lot of money, led her to suspect he was selling drugs, she said.
According to the police affidavit, Doan admitted to investigators that she exchanged explicit text messages with the teen and confessed to sexually assaulting him on at least three occasions. She said the student extorted cash from her in exchange for his silence, the document says.
Doan appeared to have used her savings and payday loans to give her victim roughly $28,000, according to police.
Neither the school police department nor Doan’s lawyer, Roger Haynes of Dallas, returned calls seeking comment Thursday.
“She did bad,” the teen’s mother, referring to the teacher, told Fort Worth’s FOX 4 News. “And I’m not condoning what he did, because I know he was wrong at what he also did, because blackmailing is not acceptable.”
Need help? Visit RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Online Hotline or the National Sexual Violence Resource Center’s website.
