It was past midnight, and Cyndi Ussery had heard enough.
Her 15-year-old daughter, Ashley, had been heatedly arguing on the phone for 17 minutes in her bedroom, throwing out profanities and vulgar language, and the conversation had to stop.
Ready to bring the call to a halt, Ussery heard her daughter confront the person on the line with a recognizable, but unexpected name: The name of a former Warhill High School teacher who sponsored an after-school science club her daughter once participated in.
On that night in January 2015, Ussery did not yet know the science club never existed, that the teacher told her daughter he loved her, and that he called the 15-year-old almost daily.
Now, one month after Warhill students publicly voiced concerns that sexual assault victims were not being protected, Ussery is spotlighting her own daughter’s story, saying Warhill administrators also swept the now 18-year-old under the rug years earlier.
“All they had to tell me was there was no science club,” Ussery said. “But they didn’t. They said nothing.”
Ussery said her daughter was sexually assaulted by a fellow student in December 2013 in a lecture hall at Warhill. Already vulnerable, the mother said Ashley then was “manipulated and abused” by a teacher throughout 2014.
Ussery reached out with her daughter’s story several days after WYDaily broke news about a June 1 student protest at Warhill. During the protest, students and parents argued the school failed to protect victims of sexual assault.
Ussery believes the school deliberately covered up what happened to her daughter, and hopes publicizing Ashley’s story will prevent what happened to her daughter from happening to other children.
“I could have spoken up any time,” Ussery said. “But I didn’t. I tried to follow the law, trust the police and the legal system and the school. I’m speaking up now.”
Less than 10, more than zero
Ussery noticed a significant change in her daughter in spring 2014. Ashley was not participating in class, she would stand in the school hallway crying and her grades were slipping.
During a therapy session in November 2014, Ashley told a therapist a male student had raped her in a Warhill lecture hall after school on Dec. 20, 2013, Ussery said.
Ussery said the school was negligent in communicating with her regarding her own daughter as well. Ussery did not know about the rape until January 2015, after Ashley disclosed to her mother what happened over a year before.
Although a Title IX report on Ashley’s case states the school appropriately notified Ussery during the investigation, Ussery believes her daughter’s initial report about the rape to a teacher during the 2013-2014 school year went unaddressed and ignored.
The Title IX report was completed in August 2015. Title IX is a law that prohibits sex discrimination in schools that receive federal funds.
The exact date Ashley reported she was raped is not known, the report said. A teacher told Title IX investigators Ashley reported a rape sometime in the 2013-2014 school year, but was unsure exactly when.
The school division did not begin investigating the alleged rape until December 2014, the following school year, when a school counselor met with Ashley about “concerning behavior” in geography class, the report states.
Betsy Overkamp-Smith, spokeswoman for the division, said the school is required to notify parents of a reported sexual assault involving their children “within a reasonable time frame.”
Since 2013, there has only been one rape at Warhill reported to police, which was in 2015, according to James City County Police spokeswoman Stephanie Williams. According to Overkamp-Smith, schools are unable to provide data on the number of reported sexual assaults unless the annual number is over 10, due to state guidelines.
After school meetings
In the months after the alleged rape occurred, Ashley began hanging back after school, spending time alone with a male teacher, Ussery said. The then 14-year-old told her mother she was staying after for a science club, and came home with requests for Ussery to buy her physics books.
In mid-April 2014, school administrators discovered the after school meetings between Ashley and her teacher were occurring, and opened an internal investigation, according to the Title IX report.
Despite the investigation, Ussery said school officials failed to disclose the true nature of her daughter’s meetings with the science teacher.
“She came home upset because administrators were questioning her about [the teacher],” Ussery said, referring to a period in April 2014. “I had to ask the school to find out if the investigation was even happening.”
Ussery met with administrators several days later about the investigation, stating she believed her daughter was meeting the teacher for a club.
In their meeting, Ussery said administrators failed to tell her the science club did not exist.
“The reality of what was taking place was something I never even thought of,” Ussery said.
In mid-June, the teacher resigned from his position at Warhill for reasons “unrelated” to the investigation, the report states. The investigation closed, and Ussery was not notified further of her daughter’s involvement with the teacher.
Overkamp-Smith declined to comment on the basis for the teacher’s resignation, as it is a personnel matter.
The teacher found a new job at Newport News Public Schools in September 2015, according to his resume, which is listed publicly online.
Phone calls every day
Although the teacher resigned from his position at Warhill High School in June 2014, his communications with Ashley only increased.
Ussery’s Verizon phone bills show Ashley’s line had hundreds of incoming and outgoing calls with the teacher between May 2014 – a month before he left Warhill – and January 2015.
The phone number listed on the teacher’s online resume matches the phone number listed on Ussery’s phone bill.
“The abuse took place after he had left the school, at that time she was just being ‘groomed’ as the [Child Protective Services] investigator put it,” Ussery wrote in an email. ”If I’d known the truth, maybe I could have shielded her from this.”
One phone bill shows Ashley and the teacher spoke 111 times over the phone between Jan. 1 and 18, the night Ussery overheard her daughter arguing with the teacher.
When Ussery found Ashley on the phone with the teacher after midnight Jan. 18, 2015, she downloaded voicemails and text messages from her daughter’s phone.
“Hey, sweetie, it’s about 10 o’clock.,” the teacher says in a Dec. 20, 2014 voicemail. “I literally only have about two minutes. I just wanted to call and let you know I’m thinking about you and I hope that you – I hope that you’ve had a good day. You know I love you and talk to you tomorrow night when I can. Alright, sweetie, I’ll see you. Bye.”
In other voicemails, the man references his wife.
A phone message left with the former teacher requesting comment was not immediately returned Wednesday evening.
In March 2016, Ussery notified the Newport News Public Schools superintendent of the teacher’s actions with her daughter.
Two months later, Ussery received a letter from the Newport News school division stating the teacher’s teaching license had been cancelled.
The letter did not specifically state the reason for the license cancellation.
Sexually assaulted, but no offender
Reports from a therapist and Child Protective Services confirm Ashley was likely sexually assaulted while she was a student at Warhill, although no reports confirm the names of either the student or teacher.
According to Ussery, Ashley’s post-traumatic stress disorder has prevented her from remembering where she was assaulted, a key detail in confirming the identity of the assailants.
The Title IX report, which was conducted by Williamsburg-James City County Title IX Coordinator Stephanie Bourgeois, states investigators could not confirm Ashley was raped in December 2013.
“The investigator cannot conclude that, by a preponderance of the evidence, a sexual assault, and more specifically, a rape, did in fact occur,” the Title IX report states.
The report also could not confirm the former teacher had a sexual relationship with Ashley.
“There were no findings that that interactions were inappropriate,” the report states.
“Dr. [Bourgeois] also found no evidence of abuse having taken place [at Warhill], while the investigation by Virginia Beach Child Protective Services, including a forensic interview, found a very different result,” Ussery wrote in an email to a Department of Education employee.
Investigations into alleged assaults vary on a case-by-case basis, Bourgeois said. Bourgeois spoke to WYDaily to answer general questions about Title IX procedures, because specific Title IX cases and student issues are confidential.
Bourgeois said police are not always immediately involved in sexual assault investigations at local schools, because school officials must gather specific details of the incident first. If case details are available and specific enough early on, police will be notified “almost immediately.”
“The police report is typically made before the internal investigation is complete,” Bourgeois said.
When Ussery discovered in January 2015 that her daughter had been raped a year earlier, she filed a police report.
Ussery said she filed the only police report regarding her daughter’s alleged rape, and the schools never filed a police report. Data from James City County Police shows there was only one rape reported at Warhill in 2015, and none reported in 2013 and 2014.
James City County Deputy Chief Steve Rubino said police will become involved in school sexual assault cases if any party – like parents, the victim or school staff – notifies them a sexual assault has allegedly taken place.
Further, child protective services will only be notified about the incident if it involves an adult and a child. Since the school’s Title IX investigation denies knowledge of any inappropriate actions between Ashley and the teacher, police were not informed and neither was Child Protective Services.
Ussery said Williamsburg Child Protective Services were never notified of any case involving her daughter and the teacher.
As of July 5, no students or former Warhill teachers had been charged with any crimes relating to Ussery’s daughter, Ussery said.
“I would have protected her, if I had known what was happening,” Ussery said. “Now I just want to make sure this doesn’t happen to anyone else’s children. I just don’t want anyone else’s son or daughter to get hurt like my daughter was.”
Fearing may be reached regarding this story, or any other story ideas at [email protected].
Editor’s note: WYDaily does not name victims of sexual assaults or other crimes. The victim’s name in this story has been changed to “Ashley” to protect her identity. She does not have the same surname as her mother. The name of her high school science teacher has also been withheld, because he has not been formally charged by police.
