Former Fresno teacher’s aide who had sex with special needs student will be spared prison
A former Hoover High School teacher’s aide charged with having sex with a special needs student won’t be going to prison, a Fresno County Superior Court Judge reluctantly ruled Wednesday.
Defendant Theresa Ramirez, 41, would have faced a maximum of five years in prison had she been convicted on all the charges against her.
Those charges included three felony counts of unlawful sex with a minor, one felony count of oral copulation, and one misdemeanor count of contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
Instead, Ramirez agreed to a plea deal with the prosecution, pleading no contest to unlawful sex with a minor. And in exchange, she was given two years probation and no jail or prison time.
The rest of the charges were dropped and Ramirez doesn’t have to register as a sex offender.
Judge Adolfo Corona initially called the agreement “light treatment” given the seriousness of the charges.
Police said Ramirez met the student in 2015 when he was just 16 years old. She began to tutor him, but that relationship soon became a sexual one.
Ramirez’s attorney Jane Boulger said the student was assigned an aid due to a diagnoses of ADHD. The aid helped the student stay on task and focus on the teacher and assignments.
The student told police Ramirez would pick him up from Hoover and take him to her apartment where they would have sex in her bedroom, according to court testimony from investigators.
At times, the student’s friends would also hang out at Ramirez’s apartment and smoke marijuana and drink, police said.
Prosecutor Adam Christopherson explained to the judge there were several challenges with the case, including the victim not wanting to testify during a trial and the inability to locate two witnesses who were expected to corroborate his story.
Christopherson also spoke to the victim and his family and they approved of the plea agreement. A criminal protective order has also been put in place forbidding Ramirez from contacting him.
Boulger read a statement from Ramirez, who appeared too emotional to read it.
The statement said, in part, that she was sorry for the harm she has caused and for the emotional trauma she has put her family through, especially her children.
“I am in counseling now so that I will never go down this road again,” Boulger read from the statement.
Boulger acknowledged that while her client’s sentence may seem “light” because she is not in prison or jail, she and her family have suffered from the criticism of the community.
This story was originally published August 24, 2022 at 4:23 PM.
