A former Boeing information technology professional pleaded guilty to posing as a young surfer on social media to lure at least 17 underage girls, some of whom he molested.
An Orange County community theater actress who has received much praise on this very site has been arrested for allegedly molesting a 14-year-old girl she taught at a Riverside performing arts school.
A Fullerton school district investigation is being sought into whether a recent retiree engaged in sexual misconduct with students when he was a teacher. He’d also served as the teacher union president.
The Fullerton Police Department has released the name and mugshot of the suspected Fullerton College groper.
And, a Garden Grove woman has been charged with violating a protective order by facilitating a phone call between an Orange County Jail inmate and the child he is accused of raping.
Michael Theodore Mordaunt was working in IT at Boeing in Seal Beach in 2014 when he was charged with multiple sex crimes involving girls ages 12 to 16. The 47-year-old Cypress resident on Thursday pleaded guilty in Orange County Superior Court to 30 felonies, including luring of a child with intent to commit a specified crime, lewd or lascivious acts with a minor, child pornography and meeting a minor to commit lewd conduct. He is scheduled to be sentenced on March 20. He’d used an image of a young teenage boy on a surfboard to create MySpace and Facebook pages that he used to contact underage girls from Feb. 25, 2009, through Jan. 15, 2014. The “boy” convinced multiple girls to send him sexually explicit photos of themselves and engage in sexually charged conversations, according to prosecutor Bobby Taghavi.
Camryn Zelinger‘s community theater acting has been described by OC Weekly critic Joel Beers as
“electrifying” and “scene-stealing,” with “panache and sensitivity” that made her “the most real person onstage.”
The Riverside Police Department describes the recently married 32-year-old as the alleged molester of one of her underage female students.
Zelinger was arrested last Monday, Feb. 6, at Encore High School for the Arts, where the popular teacher taught musical theater and directed some musicals. She has since been fired. Zelinger made her $50,000 bail and was released from the Riverside jail two hours after being booked on suspicion of lewd or lascivious acts with a minor and annoying or molesting a child younger than 18. The police investigation of her began after the mother of the 14-year-old girl discovered the teacher had repeatedly been sexting the teen. “Inappropriate physical contact and communications” took place over the “past few months,” according to a Riverside Police Department news release. Parents of Encore High students told television news reporters that Zelinger would request other teachers remove the female student from their classrooms so she could spend time with the gifted young singer. The girl’s family plans to seek civil action, according to their lawyer. Police do not believe at this point that there are other victims nor that any other faculty members were involved.
Charles T. “Chuck” Ritz III, who is the subject of police investigations in La Habra and Illinois due to long ago allegations of sexual misconduct with students, is now the desired target of a Fullerton Joint Union High School District probe as well. A petition has been signed by 300 people seeking an “investigative special counsel” be hired by the Fullerton secondary school system. Joelle Casteix, an FOW (Friend of the Weekly) whose quest for justice for young sexual abuse victims extends beyond her role as western regional director with Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), delivered the petition to the Fullerton Joint Union district’s Board of Trustees at Tuesday’s meeting. The following day, Orange County Register investigative reporter Tony Saavedra received this email from district Human Resources Director Carl Erickson: “We promptly investigate and take appropriate action to address any claims of misconduct against a student by our employees or anyone else on our campuses.” But Erickson cautioned complaints from Fullerton students about Ritz have yet to surface. The 65-year-old math teacher, who retired from his La Habra High School teaching post in May 2016, is the focus of a criminal investigation in Illinois for allegations of child sexual abuse when he taught near Chicago in the mid-1980s.
Despite knowing about the allegations when Ritz left Illinois, school officials there did not alert administrators with the Fullerton Joint Union High School District, where he would go on to teach for the next 30 years. Shortly before Ritz retired, the then-Fullerton Secondary Teachers Association president was among the “distinguished speakers” at a conference staged by Brea-based The Parents’ Voice, which “aspires to keep parents abreast of challenges and issues that impact their student.” While Orange Countians seek more answers about Ritz’s full impact on local students, the Committee for the Safety of Foreign Exchange Students is also soliciting complaints about him. “CSFES has just received information that the police are investigating Charles T. Ritz III (65), better known as Chuck Ritz, for sexual misconduct that goes as far back as 1975 and may have continued up until recently,” reads a post on the group’s website. “We have been told that some of his victims may have been earlier exchange students from at least Austria, Finland and Germany. If you have information about Mr. Charles (Chuck) T. Ritz III, please contact the Committee for the Safety of Foreign Exchange Students through Lise Lotte M Almenningen at ma***************@cs***.org or the CEO of CSFES, Danielle Grijalva, at dg*******@cs***.org or the police in California through Detective Forgash of the La Habra Police Department at JF******@la*******.gov.
Aris Hyung Yoon, 34, of Buena Park, has been identified as the alleged Fullerton College groper we told you about last week. His name and mugshot originally were not released due to the ongoing investigation into two women being sexually assaulted several minutes apart the evening of Jan. 31 on the walkway separating the campus music and theater arts buildings. He grabbed the first female in the crotch around 6:30 p.m. and later did the same to a second before last being spotted running toward Lemon Street. Campus safety officers say Yoon was acting erratic and displaying signs of being under the influence of a controlled substance when he was detained the next day. That’s when it was determined he matched the description of the groper. Yoon was placed under arrest by Fullerton Police Department officers.
Jessica Lee Pearles facilitated phone contact between a 9-year-old female family member and an unidentified man sitting in Orange County Jail because he allegedly raped the girl multiple times in 2014, according to the Orange County District Attorney’s office. The contact, which happened between April 29 and Nov. 22 of 2016, violates a protective order that forbids any communication between the rape suspect and his alleged victim, the OCDA notes. “Pearles is accused of speaking to the man on a recorded line about the stay-away order,” reads an OCDA advisory, “and willfully violating it by allowing his conversations with [the girl].” After an investigation, Garden Grove Police Department officers arrested Pearles at her workplace Friday.. The 37-year-old Garden Grove resident faces one misdemeanor count of violation of a protective order and, if convicted, up to a year in county jail. Her arraignment date has yet to be set.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.