Reported by Vic Gideon
Created: 10/28/2005 5:40:45 PM
Updated:10/28/2005 6:15:19 PM
CUYAHOGA FALLS -- At least two years ago, prosecutors and the school district knew of allegations a Cuyahoga Falls middle school teacher
had sex with an underage former student.
This week, former music teacher Brian Ebie was arrested in Arizona where he now teaches, two years after the allegations first surfaced.
Ebie, 38, is now an assistant dean of fine arts at the University of Arizona. But from 1990 to 2001, he taught music at Roberts Middle School in
Cuyahoga Falls.
"We were made aware of the allegations several years after the teacher had left the district," Cuyahoga Falls Superintendent Edwin Hollard
says. "As immediately, we've reported the information and the allegations to the county prosecutor."
Two years after Ebie left, in 2003, a former middle school student -- then eighteen -- confided in a school administrator she had a sexual
relationship with Ebie from June 1999 to June 2000 when she was a fourteen and fifteen year old high school student.
But the victim, ready to start college, didn't want to press charges.
"We had a victim that had a lot of things going on and really wasn't ready to come forward and to give a statement either to my office or to a
police department so it left us in a position where we didn't have enough to prosecute," Summit County Prosecutor Sherri Bevan Walsh says.
Despite the fact there were no charges filed two years ago, the Cuyahoga Falls School District made sure that Ebie would never again teach
school children in Ohio.
Walsh says she handled this case personally and had hoped one day the victim would reconsider - and give them enough to prosecute Ebie.
He's still in a Tucson jail on $100,000 bond and will face an extradition hearing next week.
http://www.wkyc.com/akron/akron_article.aspx?storyid=42672
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Guv'mint
Skoolin'
"DUHMAG.COM"
2005
