Elsie Cathy Rodriguez

Elsie Rodriguez is a 32 year old middle school teacher from Las Flores, California in Orange County. She’s been arrested on charges of child annoyance:

Las Flores Middle School teacher Elsie Cathy Rodriguez’s friendship with a 13-year-old student started off routinely enough, in an after-school club preparing kids to run the Los Angeles Marathon.

Her relationship with the southern Orange County boy eventually became closer, however, and included rendezvous in an apartment complex hot tub, conversations about sex and hundreds of cellphone text messages, according to investigators for the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.

It ended in May, when Rodriguez was arrested on suspicion of child annoyance, suspended from teaching at the school near Mission Viejo, and ordered to stay away from the boy, now 15.

So Rodriguez isn’t technically charged with any crime of physical contact with the kid. But police think she was “grooming” him for a relationship:

Although prosecutors do not allege that Rodriguez had a physical relationship with the boy, whose identity is being withheld by The Times, they say the teacher was on the verge of initiating one.

“We believe she was grooming him,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Heather Brown, declining to comment further.

The kid’s father had obtained a restraining order against Rodriguez before her arrest, which suggests that things got well out of hand.

Rodriguez’s attorney blames the allegations on Rodriguez’s estranged husband:

Stokke blames the allegations on Rodriguez’s estranged husband Christopher Nils Connolly, who he said was “disgruntled.”

He also said the boy and his father were friends of Connolly’s.

[...]

When Connolly met the boy shortly before the March 2005 marathon, he learned that the teen’s father lived in the same Aliso Viejo apartment complex as Connolly and Rodriguez, and the teen stayed there every other week, according to the statement.

After the marathon, Connolly wrote that he noticed increased contact between his wife and the student — trips to the complex’s hot tub, car rides alone — and grew increasingly disturbed by it, according to the statement.

“It started to bother me very much, and [I] commented to her that it was not normal for a 31-year-old woman, never mind schoolteacher, to be having this amount of contact with a minor,” he wrote in the statement.

Rodriguez also apparently kept a journal, which had some pretty damaging entries:

Entries in the teacher’s journal, filed in court when Rodriguez unsuccessfully sought a restraining order against Connolly, alleging that he was harassing her, describe graphic sexual fantasies about other students.

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