School Officer Linked to Rape

A female Fallbrook High School campus security officer will be arraigned today on charges of drugging and raping a 15-year-old male student on three occasions.

In the second case of its kind at Fallbrook High School this year, Carol Armes was arrested Friday morning while on duty at the high school, where she has been a campus security officer for eight years.

The 40-year-old Fallbrook mother of three will be arraigned on three counts of child molestation, three counts of rape by drug inducement and three counts of oral copulation by drug inducement, Detective Tom Bulow said.

The alleged rapes of the 15-year-old occurred on three separate occasions off-campus during weekends and nights, including at an Oceanside motel, at her home in Fallbrook and in a remote area of Pala, Bulow said.

Armes and the boy, a high school freshman, had become friends shortly after the beginning of the school year, Bulow said, and the friendship intensified as the year progressed.

“They were quite close friends, and it seemed to me that it should have been apparent to most people that it was more than just a high school security guard and a kid having a friendship,” Bulow said.

The two became friends outside of school, with Armes going shopping with the boy and giving him “rides to basketball games and things like that,” Bulow said.

During the three alleged rapes, “the victim claims that something was either put in his drink or in his food that caused him to eventually become dizzy or to lose consciousness,” Bulow said.

The boy said he passed out on each occasion and awoke to find Armes engaging in sexual acts with him, and that he was weak and unable to resist, Bulow said.

Another 15-year-old boy witnessed at least one of the rapes, Bulow said.

The boy alleges that Armes, who is recently divorced from a night custodian at the high school, once bought him a compact disc player and told him not to tell anyone about their relationship, Bulow said.

The boy’s mother became suspicious June 8 after Armes called her and “talked to her about whether or not she was angry that there was a relationship between her” and the boy, Bulow said.

It was then that the mother pressed her son into telling her more about the relationship, Bulow said.

The boy had tried to discontinue the relationship several times, Bulow said.

“He is bothered by other things that have happened to his life and this has just added to it. He wanted it to stop, had threatened Armes with writing a letter to the school officials, which he wrote but never delivered,” Bulow said.

Bulow said “there are indications that there may be other victims, but none of them have been identified yet.”

Armes’ arrest on suspicion of molesting a student comes six weeks after another Fallbrook High School employee pleaded guilty in Vista Superior Court to the statutory rape of a teen-age female student.

Kevin McLean, 32, will be sentenced Aug. 31 after a psychiatric evaluation is completed and could be sentenced to as much as three years in prison. The former band teacher pleaded guilty to one felony count of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor in exchange for the prosecution dropping 10 other counts of having sex with two band students, ages 16 and 17.

Fallbrook Union High School Supt. Robert Thomas said the district has been rocked by the second accusation of sexual misconduct.

“I’ve been in the business for 32 years and never have been confronted by this before. And now, all of a sudden, I’ve had two of these situations in the last six months,” Thomas said. “It’s almost unbelievable.”

Armes has been a model employee with the district for eight years, two of her children have attended the high school, and a daughter graduated last week, Thomas said.

The school board is likely to put Armes on leave pending the outcome of the charges at their June 22 meeting, Thomas said.

Armes was being held in lieu of $75,000 bail at the Las Colinas County Jail.

Times correspondent Kathy McDonald contributed to this story.