An El Segundo fifth-grade teacher who also worked as a counselor at two youth camps is guilty of the “repeated violation of young boys,” a prosecutor told jurors Monday, but a defense attorney said her client was the target of a conservative community, classroom troublemakers and a clique of teachers.
Jeffrey Simonek, 29, is charged with 19 felony counts of lewd acts upon children involving 12 boys, between 2006 and 2012. One count was dismissed during a preliminary hearing. Simonek has been held on $20 million bail since his arrest Nov. 26, 2013.
“Ever since McMartin, we know how something like this can happen,” defense attorney Steffeny Holtz told the nine-man, three-woman jury, referencing the late-1980s trial of a family that operated the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, in which dozens of children told stories of sexual abuse and bizarre Satanic rituals but the defendants were ultimately acquitted.
But Deputy District Attorney Simone Shay told jurors there was no community conspiracy at work targeting the gay teacher.
“This is not about the defendant being homosexual,” Shay said. “This case is about the defendant’s repeated violation of young boys.”
The prosecutor alleged that Simonek, while working as a “pal” at a camp for children with chronic disabilities, traveled to Disneyland with one family and touched a 4-year-old boy between his legs while sitting directly behind him on the Big Thunder Mountain ride.
The boy’s mother was “unnerved and upset,” but wasn’t entirely sure what she had seen, Shay said.
“She doesn’t want to overreact, she doesn’t want to be hysterical,” according to the prosecutor.
The family went to Disneyland with Simonek again the next year and when the mother saw Simonek with his hand up her son’s shirt, rubbing his chest and whispering to him while in a line for a ride, she grabbed the boy and vowed never to let him alone with the camp counselor, Shay told jurors.
At the Grizzly Lodge camp in the Lake Tahoe area, where one camper had contracted Lyme disease, Simonek looked down the boys’ shorts during tick check and one boy told prosecutors Simonek reached inside his pants and touched him, according to Shay.
As a new teacher’s aide at Center Street School in El Segundo, Simonek was told not to hug the kids and not to be alone with them, the prosecutor told jurors.
He was “given a very specific lecture” about “all this physical contact” during recess, Shay said.
But at least four fifth-grade boys in a class Simonek taught several years later said “he would massage their shoulders, he would rub their heads and they were uncomfortable,” Shay told jurors.
“Many of the touchings are what we would consider very minor,” Shay acknowledged, but said they were “done with sexual intent.”
The defense attorney said, however, that at least 10 children, including one boy with perfect attendance, would testify they never saw Simonek do anything inappropriate.
“It never happened,” Holtz said repeatedly.
Simonek’s classroom had 30 children and three full-time adult aides in a 30-foot by 31-foot space, Holtz told the jury.
“What you’re never going to hear is that Mr. Simonek was alone with a child,” she said.
Simonek’s troubles began, Holtz said, when he went to a party in El Segundo and told a mom he didn’t like the attitude of a troublemaking boy named Ethan.
“They’re very, very conservative … they don’t tend to like outsiders,” Holtz said of the El Segundo community, where the news spread quickly.
Ethan’s parents called the school the next day to complain.
“The other teachers, some of them did not like Mr. Simonek,” Holtz said. “He wasn’t quite part of their group.”
Gender bias and sexual orientation bias led to complaints about Simonek coming to kids’ sports games, even though other teachers routinely attended, according to the defense attorney.
Later that summer, when it was clear that Simonek was going to be rehired and would get his own classroom, another teacher and a union representative made an anonymous call to police saying Simonek had molested two boys.
Ethan, who “was very mad at Mr. Simonek,” and two other boys, who Holtz called “the three Musketeers” were among those who testified to a grand jury that he had touched them inappropriately.
Holtz read comments written in Simonek’s yearbook by Ethan and one of those friends, thanking the teacher for helping them through the school year.
Simonek, who sat quietly throughout the opening statements in a dark suit and dark red tie, is expected to testify in his own defense.
— City News Service