A former Mount Carmel High School teacher who pleaded guilty to committing sex acts on an underage female student was sentenced Wednesday to three years in state prison.
Stacy Michelle Walker, 40, was arrested in March and initially charged with 17 felonies for what a prosecutor called "a highly inappropriate relationship" that began when the victim was 15 years old and continued until 2020, when the victim was 18.
Walker, previously a drama and theater tech teacher and a former Mount Carmel High student, pleaded guilty last month to three sex crime counts and her plea included an admission that she took advantage of a position of trust or confidence to commit the offense. Along with prison time, she is required to register as a sex offender for life.
A criminal complaint states the crimes occurred in 2018 and 2019. The victim reported the offenses to police last July.
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Now 22 years old, the victim described at length in court how she was groomed by her former teacher and led to believe she and Walker were in a loving relationship.
She said Walker would provide "special treatment" for her, such as trips to restaurants and shows, and eventually started broaching sexual topics in their conversations.
Walker's treatment of the girl escalated into controlling behavior, requests for sexually explicit pictures and videos via an encrypted messaging application, and sex acts, the victim said.
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Knowing that their relationship could not be made public, the victim said she frequently lied to protect Walker, who she said "forced me to live a complete double life. It exhausted me to the point of no return."
The victim said, "For years, I was forbidden to keep any sort of paper trail of my thoughts and feelings. I was forced to contain the vast burden of everything I had experienced to myself in order to protect what I thought was a relationship of true love. Now I know it was all just to protect her. My feelings, my wellbeing, my safety, were never a part of the equation."
The victim, who said she suffers from depression, anxiety, and panic attacks, and has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, said her complicated feelings for Walker led her to feel guilty even as she reported the sexual abuse to police.
"My heart was breaking for her rather than for myself and everything I had endured up to that point," she said.
Addressing Walker, she said the former teacher "knew right from wrong" and said Walker once commented about knowing it was wrong that she "fell in love with me the second you laid eyes upon me in your office" when the girl was 15.
"It was never my job to police your adult decisions and behaviors," she told Walker. "You were 18 years older than me. Our age gap was larger than my age itself when I first became your student."
