Teachers never cease to impress in their quests to have sex with underage high school students. The latest incident appears to involve a 15-year-old girl and a lusty 54-year-old male teacher who routinely hid her away in his bachelor pad in a shabby apartment community.
The twist this time is that the teacher, Duane Ernest Adams, said he and the girl have exchanged wedding vows a well as rings, reports the Ocala Star-Banner. They’re in love, see. And Adams assured detectives that, in the eyes of God, he and the girl are married.
He added that his plan had been to wait until the girl turns 16, then elope to another state and marry, in the eyes of the state government, using fake names.
Adams, who is divorced from his real, adult wife, was 39 years old when the unidentified student was born.
In a further twist, Adams is also a retired U.S. Army sergeant first class with over 20 years of service.
The two lovebirds met at the Francis Military Academy in Ocala, Fla. where Adams taught Russian and was the athletic director. He also established an orienteering team.
Things began looking bleak for Adams last Friday when he stopped by the 15-year-old girl’s house to pick her up to take her to school. The girl’s mother told him to leave. Then the mom took the girl to school.
However, the girl apparently didn’t show up for school. Her parents got worried and, consequently, reported her as a runaway.
Through interviews this week, primarily with Adams and the girl, detectives have been able to establish a winding trail of sex lasting about six months. In addition to a multitude of rendezvous at Adams’s apartment, there was sex in Daytona Beach. (Adams reportedly wore a blond wig for that encounter.) There was also sex at a place in Ocala where people rent little cabins.
One of Adams’s neighbors, Caleb Gillings, told News 13 that he had observed Adams and a young girl entering the apartment quite a few times. He also noted that shower curtains covered the windows. (In a police interview, the girl noted that Adams likes to walk around naked.)
“I’d just seen them get in and out of their car. They didn’t really talk to me at all,” the neighbor told the Central Florida television station. “He was an older guy; she was younger. I knew she looked really young but I didn’t know her exact age.”
The director of Francis Military Academy, Col. William “Bill” Archibald, described his reaction to the revelations as “absolutely appalled.”
He also promised that Adams will be fired.
“We can’t have him back,” Archibald told the Star-Banner. “We’re all beside ourselves at the academy.”
For now, though, the athletic director has been only suspended without pay.
Adams faces two dozen criminal counts including eight counts each of sexual battery, lewd and lascivious exhibition and lewd and lascivious molestation.
Since his initial arrest, the judge has more than doubled his bond, which had originally been set at $176,000.
“I’m very sorry for the trepidation on what the girl and family is going through and the blight brought on Francis Military Academy, which is a great school and doesn’t deserve this,” Adams told a Star-Banner reporter on Thursday at the Marion County Jail.
At another instance, he noted to the Times-Banner that he had gotten “caught up with something I shouldn’t have done.”
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