Warning Signs Didn’t Save Teen

Years before he would kill student Mayra Mora-Lopez, he described beating another young woman when he applied to be a teacher’s aide for the Long Beach Unified School District.

“I had an argument with my ex-girlfriend.... I hit her, causing her injuries. I was arrested and convicted to a city jail for 90 days,” Pedro Tepoz-Leon wrote on a 1992 form the district requires of applicants with criminal records.

It was the first of two written admissions about the beating that Tepoz-Leon made while asking to be hired by the state’s third-largest school district.

Four years later, as a teacher’s aide applying to become a teacher, he again detailed the incident, for which he had pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges. “I reacted violently and stroke her.... I had beaten up my girlfriend.... I had inflicted some serious injuries.”

Why the school district hired him is among many disturbing questions in the tragedy of an immigrant beauty and the popular Woodrow Wilson High teacher-coach who was recently convicted of killing her.

After less than an hour of jury deliberations late last year, Tepoz-Leon was convicted of first-degree murder. On Jan. 29, hours after a judge sentenced him to 26 years to life in prison, Tepoz-Leon cut his own throat and arm and bled to death on a county jail bunk.

The parents of Mora-Lopez have sued the district. Long Beach school officials, while calling the case heartbreaking, have broadly defended the hiring of Tepoz-Leon. The officials said applicants convicted of misdemeanors could be hired if the crimes had no bearing on their fitness to teach, and especially if rejecting them might have constituted discrimination against a minority.

“When the court examines the facts,” district spokesman Dick Van Der Laan said, “it will be clear that an outstanding principal and school district acted appropriately.... Both followed reasonable and prudent steps mandated by law during the hiring and employment of Pedro Tepoz-Leon.”

Other troubling questions linger.

Why was he charged with misdemeanors when he admitted beating his then-girlfriend so badly he broke her jaw and eye socket and detached her retina? How does a person get a state teaching credential with such a record?

“You hear him describe in his own words what he did and still put him in school with students?” said Michele Patterson, attorney for Mora-Lopez’s parents. “That is absolutely a foreseeable danger. And Mora-Lopez is dead today as a result. They took a huge risk in hiring him.”

There were pivotal points on the path to Mayra Mora-Lopez’s death where the tragedy might have been prevented, but wasn’t. The district notes, for example, that had Tepoz-Leon been charged with a felony, he would never have become a teacher. And when Mora-Lopez, caught in a troubled relationship, finally did reach for a lifeline, it was too little, too late.

Perhaps most painful for her family, why was she living not with them but a roommate and, in the end, a teacher-turned-lover?

“It’s so tempting to lay this at the schoolhouse door,” said Van Der Laan, “when there is plenty of blame to go around, and it starts a long way back.”

Mora-Lopez was 16 and Tepoz-Leon 31 when both arrived at the Wilson campus in September 1999.

She had been born in Tijuana and, until coming to California, had lived with her mother, Marcela Lopez, a teacher who understood the value of an American education. It was sometime after her quinceanera, a coming-out party on her 15th birthday, when Mayra got her mother’s blessing to live with her father, Martin Mora, a cabdriver in Long Beach.

Mora-Lopez was just 7 years old when Tepoz-Leon beat up his first girlfriend, Laura Hoffenberg, on June 15, 1990, in their Long Beach apartment. He described the beating in his application to become a teacher:

“I was intoxicated. Next thing I remember, my girlfriend and I were engaged in an argument I reacted ... violently I don’t remember anything else.”

Police, court records and testimony show that he squeezed her throat until, she said, she thought she was dying and lost consciousness. Tepoz-Leon called police before climbing into their bathtub and cutting one wrist superficially.

“I woke up in a hospital bed where I was informed that I had beaten up my girlfriend. I had inflicted some serious wounds.... I had tried to commit suicide,” he wrote to the district.

What came next was the first in a series of crucial judgment calls that define this case.

He was charged with misdemeanor battery, corporal infliction of injury on a domestic partner and assault with a deadly weapon. In return for a guilty plea, the last charge was dropped. He was convicted of the first two and got a 90-day jail sentence and three years’ probation. He also was ordered to complete psychological counseling and quit drinking.

The criminal court file from 1990 was destroyed some years ago, but what remains of the record shows that Long Beach police filed an arrest warrant for misdemeanors, but may have done so under instruction from the city prosecutor’s office, which handles non-felonies in Long Beach.

The detectives have since retired, said Police Cmdr. Greg Allison, who found no paperwork about the decision. However, he noted that there has been a societal evolution toward deeper understanding of, and tougher penalties for, domestic violence in the 14 years since the first Tepoz-Leon incident.

The decision not to pursue felony charges against Tepoz-Leon, in hindsight, was key to what would follow, said Mary Armstrong, general counsel for the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing.

“When something is minimized at the criminal level, other agencies tend to minimize it, too,” she said. “They take it as a cue. Unfortunately, that’s the way domestic violence is treated sometimes, and this was before O.J.”

In 1992, while still on probation, Tepoz-Leon began working as a teacher’s aide for Long Beach Unified. In September 1996, Tepoz-Leon earned his degree in political science from Cal State Long Beach and started as a temporary contract employee teaching bilingual education to first-graders at King-Edison Elementary School.

Some involved in the case note he was hired when districts all over California, trying to comply with a new state law, were scrambling to staff classrooms with one teacher for every 20 students.

Tepoz-Leon applied to the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, which screens applicants to verify they have completed educational requirements.

A felony conviction automatically eliminates a candidate, but the commission has the discretion to issue credentials to people with misdemeanors, taking into account various circumstances, such as the nature of the offense and the applicant’s age when the incident occurred.

“Five or six years had passed in this case and he had not had any problems,” Armstrong said. “You have to make a judgment call based on what information you have.”

Last fiscal year, 251,000 people applied for credentials in California. Of the 8,934 flagged for review because of misdemeanor convictions or other reasons, all but 841 received them.

“I’ve been asked about this case many times,” Armstrong said, “and I don’t know that you can fashion a law that would have prevented this, unless you are going to outlaw anyone with a domestic violence conviction of any type from becoming a teacher. There are hundreds of thousands of people in this state with those convictions, and anytime you try zero tolerance, you immediately have people wanting exceptions.”

And, she added, there might not be enough people to teach children if the state adopted a zero-tolerance approach.

By 2002, Tepoz-Leon was a popular figure at Wilson, teaching Spanish and coaching girls’ and boys’ soccer.

Mora-Lopez, too, found various niches in this new turf, according to friends, former teachers and students. She joined campus clubs. She was bright and spoke English. Yet she was a 19-year-old senior who still needed summer school to officially graduate.

She had gotten an A as a teacher’s aide for Tepoz-Leon, but earned few if any other such high grades, said Summer Wright, 25, whose ex-boyfriend taught with, coached with and lived with Tepoz-Leon.

The pair had only that class together, but also in common was the Latin American Club, in which he was faculty advisor and she was a member.

Mora-Lopez, friends said, was warm and charming, with striking looks -- much like they described the older man she would fall for.

“She had long dark hair she almost always wore pulled back, and she had a great body, and didn’t mind being noticed,” Wright said. “I knew Pedro first, through my ex. He always seemed like a good guy. He was always trying to improve himself.”

Exactly when the pair graduated from student and teacher to couple is not clear. They kept their affair a secret from most friends, as well as her relatives, until the summer of 2002, when they rented an apartment a block from the beach.

Mora-Lopez told some friends she no longer fit into her father’s household -- although he drove her to work at McDonald’s sometimes, and picked her up for breakfast four or five days a week.

After summer school one day in July 2002, Wright picked her up at Wilson and saw that her forehead and arms were bruised. Back at the couple’s apartment, she saw piles of Mora-Lopez’s clothes on the living-room floor.

“She said Pedro kicked her out of the bedroom and wouldn’t give her a pillow or blankets,” Wright recalled.

Wright called her former neighbor Kerry Kemble, a Wilson teacher. The two women took Mora-Lopez to Long Beach police that afternoon, although it took great effort.

Two Spanish-speaking officers, one female, assured Mora-Lopez she would have help, that shelters and counselors were standing by. She bolted without giving her own or Pedro’s last name.

“The officer and a detective tried, I’d say, for a good half hour,” said Cmdr. Allison. “Cases like this, you feel like you’re holding someone at the edge of a cliff, and they let go and slip away.”

The next morning, Kemble said, she notified Wilson Principal Sandy Blazer. Although she is named in the parents’ lawsuit and Patterson, their attorney, originally criticized Blazer for failing to alert Mora-Lopez’s parents, Patterson said she has since learned that Blazer had tried to help.

Blazer called Mora-Lopez out of summer classes, saw the injuries for herself and coaxed the truth out of her: She and Tepoz-Leon were a couple, and during a fight at their apartment, he had slammed her head into a wall and left her limbs marbled with bruises and her forehead visibly injured, according to Patterson. Mora-Lopez could not be persuaded to turn him in.

Like most states, with the exception of Nevada and a few others, it is not against the law in California for a teacher to have sex with a student. It is against the law for an adult to have sex with a minor. Mora-Lopez was not under 18.

There seems wide agreement that Blazer knew nothing of the teacher’s criminal record. She testified in a deposition that she formally urged the district to fire Tepoz-Leon, Patterson said, but that someone at the district opted against it.

Instead, Patterson said, Blazer wrote a letter instructing the teacher to never be alone with a student, and Tepoz-Leon signed it on July 26, 2002.

Mora-Lopez bounced around from despair to denial. Tepoz-Leon assured her he loved her and she wondered, Wright said, whether she had provoked him. Mora-Lopez never asked Wright for help again.

Mora-Lopez did reach out to her parents, and her mother was coming to take her back to Mexico on Oct. 27, 2002, the same day police found her body in her apartment.

She had been beaten and choked until she was unconscious, then bled to death from five neat cuts across her throat. At trial, Tepoz-Leon testified that he had been defending himself against her attack and then lost control and killed her. A knife had been found in her left hand.

But she was right-handed.

And so the girl who arrived from Tijuana with big dreams of becoming a teacher was killed by one, and was returned to her homeland in a pine burial box.