Shattuck-St. Mary's 'discouragingly similar to cases like Penn State,' attorney says

By Erika Wolf Wed., Oct. 10 2012 at 5:30 AM

Lynn Seibel and Leonard Jones allegedly had inappropriate relationships with Shattuck-St. Mary's students.

Shattuck-St. Mary's School is increasingly coming under fire by authorities for the way it handled a series of inappropriate student-teacher relationships.

On Monday, former drama teacher Lynn Seibel, 70, was charged with sexual misconduct while employed by the school for allegedly encouraging male students to measure their genitals and participate in circle jerks.

Then yesterday, police revealed another sex case involving the school. Leonard Jones committed suicide in 2008 after being confronted with allegations about a three-year relationship with a teenage foreign-national student.

Now police are asking if the school did enough to protect its students.

"From our standpoint, it's another example of what's happened at that school," says Faribault Police Captain Neal Pederson. "They were aware of the incidents involving Mr. Seibel and we're interested if any policies were changed. What did the school do to change things? And then six years later, this happens again."

Seibel was dismissed by the school in 2003 after child pornography was discovered on his work computer. The school did not report the incident to the police, but it issued a statement yesterday saying that it did report a student's 2001 allegations of Seibel's sexual misconduct to the Department of Social Services as well as the Faribault Police.

Shattuck-St. Mary's said its own investigation did not corroborate the allegation, and that neither social services nor the police acted on the school's disclosures.

After the Jones incident came to light yesterday, attorney Gregg Myers of Jeff Anderson & Associates, a law firm known for litigating sexual abuse cases, said that an individual notified the firm about alleged sexual abuse by another Shattuck-St. Mary's teacher in the 1980s.

"Our understanding is that this incident from the '80s was reported to the school in the '90s," Myers said. "It's discouragingly similar to cases like Penn State or Porter-Gaud [in South Carolina], where the situation isn't handled correctly and people go on to have healthy careers as pedophiles that they should not have."

Shattuck-St. Mary's did not respond to a request for comment.

Tags:

Faribault, Gregg Myers, Jeff Anderson & Associates, Leonard Jones, Lynn Seibel, Neal Pederson, Shattuck-St. Mary's

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takencareofyou

@citypages Why did it take so, long for the old players to come out and, sue Penn State? There should be a law for that.

SewCrates

The attempt to analogize this to Penn State is unfortunate, for the victims, the school, and the Faribault community. The factually inaccurate and misleading statements surrounding this are stunning. A quick list from this article: (1) two teachers over a 15 year period is not a series; (2) the school was not aware of the specific incidents involving Seibel, but looked into allegations, and reported them to the police; (3) in 2003, the school discovered regular old porn - like the kind on your computer, not child pornography - on his work computer; and (4) the school learned about Mr. Jones, confronted him, discovered his suicide, and reported everything to the police all within a matter of an hour or two.

The victims here deserve justice and Mr. Seibel will likely spend the rest of his life in jail, but to turn this into some sort of a cover-up by misstating facts simply to drum up page views is unfortunate.

If you want a real story, you should be asking why this County Attorney and Sheriff waited until the day before the Sandusky sentencing to make a statement about Mr. Seibel (before which they notified the national media); why they then waited until the following day to release the information about Mr. Jones; and why they intentionally have misrepresented facts, publicly known facts, to the media regarding the incident with Mr. Jones in order to create the appearance of a systemic cover up. What do they have to gain?