Teacher in O.C. Faces Charge Over Relationship

Las Flores Middle School teacher Elsie Cathy Rodriguez’s friendship with a 13-year-old student started off routinely enough, in an after-school club preparing kids to run the Los Angeles Marathon.

Her relationship with the southern Orange County boy eventually became closer, however, and included rendezvous in an apartment complex hot tub, conversations about sex and hundreds of cellphone text messages, according to investigators for the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.

It ended in May, when Rodriguez was arrested on suspicion of child annoyance, suspended from teaching at the school near Mission Viejo, and ordered to stay away from the boy, now 15.

Although prosecutors do not allege that Rodriguez had a physical relationship with the boy, whose identity is being withheld by The Times, they say the teacher was on the verge of initiating one.

“We believe she was grooming him,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Heather Brown, declining to comment further.

Before the arrest, the teen’s father obtained a restraining order that required the teacher to say away from the boy.

Rodriguez, 32, faces up to a year in county jail and a $1,000 fine if convicted. She pleaded not guilty at her June 18 arraignment and has declined to comment.

Al Stokke, Rodriguez’s attorney, said that based on the evidence he had seen, Rodriguez did not act inappropriately.

“I’m still looking for the crime,” Stokke said.

Stokke blames the allegations on Rodriguez’s estranged husband Christopher Nils Connolly, who he said was “disgruntled.”

He also said the boy and his father were friends of Connolly’s.

The boy’s father, who contacted police after learning of the relationship, declined to comment.

Entries in the teacher’s journal, filed in court when Rodriguez unsuccessfully sought a restraining order against Connolly, alleging that he was harassing her, describe graphic sexual fantasies about other students. The principal of the middle school reported in a parent newsletter that she had been contacted by several families after news of the arrest. School officials declined to comment on the parents’ concerns.

Stokke said the journal was old and “totally unrelated to whatever the situation is here.”

Connolly, who has been married to Rodriguez for a decade, declined to comment. But a written statement he was asked to provide to deputies paints a picture of an increasingly close connection between Rodriguez and the boy.

In late 2004, Rodriguez met the boy at the school’s chapter of Students Run LA, a program to nurture at-risk youths by training them to run the Los Angeles Marathon. The teen played soccer and wanted to meet Connolly after learning he was a former professional soccer player in Europe, according to Connolly’s May 10 statement to the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.

When Connolly met the boy shortly before the March 2005 marathon, he learned that the teen’s father lived in the same Aliso Viejo apartment complex as Connolly and Rodriguez, and the teen stayed there every other week, according to the statement.

After the marathon, Connolly wrote that he noticed increased contact between his wife and the student -- trips to the complex’s hot tub, car rides alone -- and grew increasingly disturbed by it, according to the statement.

“It started to bother me very much, and [I] commented to her that it was not normal for a 31-year-old woman, never mind schoolteacher, to be having this amount of contact with a minor,” he wrote in the statement.

Phone records detail an increasingly intimate relationship, including more than 500 text messages between Sept. 11 and Nov. 9 in 2005. according to court records.

Meanwhile, the boy’s father grew increasingly concerned about the relationship and ordered Rodriguez to stay away from his son, according to Connolly’s statement to sheriff’s investigators. The boy’s father eventually contacted the Sheriff’s Department and got a restraining order against the teacher.