Teacher Accused Of Sexual Assault After Hypnotizing His Students

2024 Author: Steven Freeman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 08:15

A third-grade teacher is accused of sexually harassing a girl at a Pennsylvania elementary school. According to local police, the individual attempted to hypnotize several students to make them promise to obey him.

Police say Mentzer asked each girl, ages 8-11, to come to her class to record videos of an alleged project. Then she recorded them and tried to hypnotize them.

James Mentzer of Hummelstown was charged with institutional sexual assault, indecent assault, unlawful contact with a minor, and five counts of minor corruption. Police began investigating him in February, and Mentzer was fired from East Hanover Elementary School.

One of the victims told the police that he made him repeat the phrase "I will obey you, master" as he swung a necklace before his eyes.

According to the criminal complaint obtained by the local network Fox News, another of the victims told police that in January Mentzer approached her in a hallway while she was on her way to recess and asked her for help with something in her classroom, according to the criminal complaint. Mentzer and the victim were alone in their class when asked to read passages about "communities" in a package, recording the interaction on their computer. The victim said Mentzer told him to act out the words he was reading with a giraffe puppet and that he would get angry and yell at him when he didn't read like the giraffe.

Mentzer also rubbed the victim's leg, from the knee to the groin area, ignoring his requests to stop. He was also rubbing her arm and reportedly told the victim to look at objects around the room while doing so, in an attempt to distract her, the victim told police.