Teacher Gets Probation in Sex Case

Tanya Joan Hadden, the San Bernardino teacher whose relationship with a 15-year-old student began with innocent car rides and after-school French fries but strayed into romance, was given a suspended sentence Thursday and will avoid prison for now.

As Hadden sobbed and struggled to dab away her tears, with her rail-thin wrists chained to her waist, Clark County District Court Judge Joseph Bonaventure handed down a 13-year prison term--then suspended that sentence and put Hadden on probation for five years.

Technically, Hadden, 33, will spend the first six months of her probation in the Clark County Detention Center. But because she has been in jail for 140 days--ever since she and her student took off on an ill-fated road trip that landed them at a $39-a-night Vegas strip hotel--she probably will be released in coming days, once she is credited for good behavior behind bars, prosecutors said.

Relatives of Richard Pena, who earned an A in Hadden’s science class before the two purportedly fell in love and began a sexual relationship last spring, stormed out of the courtroom after realizing that Hadden’s sentence would be suspended in favor of probation. They slammed the courtroom door behind them and left, armed only with the satisfaction of having described in detail their hatred of Richard’s former teacher.

Ida Pena, Richard’s mother, recalled how Hadden had taken the time during the trip to Vegas to call her brother, asking him to swing by her house to feed her dogs. But, though they were missing for four days, she never called Richard’s relatives to tell them he was safe.

“I went to the open house at his school and I shook your hand,” Ida Pena said. “I feel like you slapped me in the face.”

Hadden still faces charges in San Bernardino, where prosecutors have pledged to proceed with a second criminal case in an effort to put Hadden behind bars for years. What’s more, Bonaventure listed restrictions she will live under forever--from curfews to a prohibition against teaching again and a requirement that she never date a man who has male children.

“This conviction is going to follow you around the rest of your life, like a Scarlet Letter,” Bonaventure said. “You were trusted, Ms. Hadden, by our society. You marred the sanctity of that relationship. And for this, you deserve to be punished. I hope you never forget it.”

“I won’t, sir,” Hadden said.

Hadden jumped at an opportunity to speak in her defense, apologizing repeatedly to Pena’s family; to Cajon High School, where she was a popular teacher before she was fired this spring; and to her former students, who, she said, “deserved better.” She also directly rebutted prosecutors’ arguments that she had never taken responsibility for the relationship.

“Please make sure he knows that he is not to blame,” she told Pena’s mother and older sister. “Every step of the way it was my decision. I have screwed up his life.” Still, Hadden seemed to send a collective shudder through the room when she responded to allegations that she had been trying to get pregnant by saying, in part, that Richard “doesn’t want children yet.”

“You should care less what he wants!” Bonaventure yelled.

Hadden, who was in her second year as a teacher, first met Pena last year in her science class. It began innocently enough, she said in recent interviews--he bummed a few rides home, then they began sitting together at a McDonald’s, then they discovered a shared love of punk rock music and deep conversation.

In April, police began investigating reports that Hadden had purchased alcohol for Pena and another student at a party. Pena, fearing his strict and protective parents, panicked, called Hadden and asked her to pick him up at a nearby college campus. She did, and on April 29 they began driving and talking. At the Nevada state line, she told him that they needed to think about what they were doing, she has said, but he pleaded with her to continue.

They wound up at the same hotel where Elvis Presley reportedly played his first Vegas gig. Despite a law enforcement search throughout the West, it took four days for authorities to find them.

Hadden initially faced 19 criminal charges in Nevada. In August, she pleaded guilty to three of them--having sex with a student, statutory sexual seduction and second-degree kidnapping.

By Thursday, Hadden had shed more than 20 pounds from an already frail frame--partly because she is a vegan and has trouble finding meals she can eat in jail. She looked out of place when court began Thursday morning. Bailiffs led in a batch of accused thieves and alleged batterers, many of them muscular gangbangers and meth junkies with bald heads and violent tattoos. Hadden, led out in chains, a blue jumpsuit and jail-issued orange shoes like the rest of the group, craned her neck to search the pews for her mother, who mouthed the words “I love you” to her.

The judge acknowledged that he was torn between two markedly different views of the case.

This summer, Las Vegas prosecutors stunned Hadden and her attorneys when they threatened to seek a life prison term. Even after Hadden pleaded guilty to three felonies, prosecutors said they would seek 25 years--more than a criminal who shoots someone often receives, her defense attorney said. Prosecutors said they were taking a hard line largely because she was a teacher.

But the judge also received numerous letters in Hadden’s support--including one calling the prosecution an overzealous “witch hunt.” He seemed swayed by her supporters’ arguments: that she is chagrined and contrite, that she will never teach again. As she pointed out in court, she will be, not only a convicted felon, but a registered sex offender for the rest of her life. She is getting a divorce.

Psychologists who have interviewed her since her arrest attribute her decisions largely to loneliness, and say she is by no means a common pedophile who is likely to prey on other children.

Her defense attorneys said that prosecutors, by bringing the kidnapping charge, were seeking to send her to prison for more years than even elementary school teacher Mary Kay LeTourneau, the most notorious similar case. LeTourneau was found guilty of having sex with a sixth-grader, then got pregnant while on probation and said the 13-year-old was the father--and received a seven-year prison term, far less than prosecutors were seeking in the Hadden case.

“When was the last ‘kidnapping’ when the kidnapper was telling the kidnappee to go home?” asked Hadden’s attorney, Deputy Public Defender Jordan Savage. “When was the last ‘kidnapping’ when the kidnapper was telling her kidnappee to call his parents?

“Justice is about proportionality,” he said. “It is about the sentence fitting the crime.”

Several legal analysts said that Hadden had become an emblem of a national effort to correct a long-standing gender split involving adults with sexual relationships with children--the divide that makes “Lolita” so unsettling, while Mrs. Robinson’s seduction of a young man in “The Graduate” is seen as a frivolous amusement.

Women, by some estimates, represent just 1% of sex offenders, and male sex offenders tend to be far more violent than females. But new research into the lasting effects that improper relationships have on teenage boys, even the apparent epidemic of molestations in the Catholic Church, have begun to shrink the gender gap in perceptions of sexual impropriety, said David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire.

“Because of our biology, the sexual involvement of juvenile girls is always going to be considered more serious,” he said. “We protect female virginity and sexuality more. But I think people have come to understand that this line is important to maintain in regard with male juveniles as well. There is a new awareness of that. We have gone through a kind of evolution in the last few years with regard to issues of adult responsibility and maintaining appropriate boundaries with young people.”

Ida Pena said Hadden could not possibly understand the effect the relationship has had--and will have--on Richard.

At one point during the Las Vegas trip, Hadden told the boy that she was considering suicide because her life had been destroyed, Pena recalled Thursday.

“To tell a 15-year-old boy that you are going to commit suicide? What do you think that did to him?” Ida Pena asked Hadden from the witness stand.

“He feels responsible for you,” she said. “You took what was a happy-go-lucky boy who always had a smile on his face, and you changed him. He is not the same boy.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. Lisa Luzaich said she respected the judge’s decision to suspend the sentence--but said Hadden had duped him.

“She paid lip service to the court,” Luzaich said after the judge’s decision. “And it worked.”