Irvine : Teacher, 25, Will Be Arraigned in Sex Case
A high school teacher was scheduled to be arraigned today in Municipal Court on charges of attempted rape and sexual assault in connection with an alleged attack on an 18-year-old girl two weeks ago on the UC campus here.
Police said the girl, who lives in La Mirada, told investigators that she had met Thomas Lawrence Mikalson, 25, of Huntington Beach in a Sunday school class he taught at a Fullerton church. She told police that she was attacked Sept. 2 when she accompanied him to an apartment on the UCI campus.
Mikalson, who was beginning his second year of teaching science at Cerritos High School, was taken into custody at the school Monday afternoon and booked into Orange County Jail on $50,000 bail.
Stan Steddom, the principal of Cerritos High, described Mikalson as “a very fine young man and morally upstanding from everything we have seen of him at school.”
“It’s very tragic what has happened. If he is guilty, it will affect him the rest of his life and that’s the tragic thing,” Steddom said.
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