The teacher whose arrest of sexual crime rocked a school in New York advocates

When one of the most prestigious private schools in New York hired Winston Nguyen in 2020, the administrators knew about sentence to crime for fraud in his troubled past. But the second chance they offered him back. Almost four years later, Mr. Nguyen, a math teacher, was arrested again, accused of teaching students. And the school, Saint Ann in Brooklyn, faced a cooling crisis.

Monday, Mr. Nguyen, 38 years old, was guilty of a crime and more offenses after being charged with Requesting Lewd images and videos from students. When he is convicted, most likely at the end of this month, he is facing a possible prison period of seven years.

His reason marks the latest chapter in a scandal that marred The reputation of Saint Ann’s school and the administrators who hired it.

It is the second time that Mr. Nguyen was convicted of a crime. In 2019, he pleaded guilty to the Grandia Larceny and other accusations after being accused of stealing over $ 300,000 from his employers, an older couple for whom he worked as a healthcare at home.

He served four months at the Rikers Island prison complex, and about a year later he was employed by Saint Ann’s, a school that charges about $ 60,000 a year in schooling and is addressed to the rich creative class in New York.

A crazy-dressed figure, which has often arrived in a costume and sometimes with a butterfly, Mr. Nguyen turned a criminal record from a CV builder to a school known for embracing unconventional educators. He taught a seminar called “crime and punishment” and quickly became an element at school.

It was the kind of opportunity that few criminals get.

In interviews with the New York Times last week, Mr. Nguyen tried to understand how he dispelled them all and how he dropped from his youth a high school student, he was once honored by the mayor of Houston, his hometown, and continued to participate in Colombia University-to be a 38-year-old man.

“I have hurt so many people,” he said.

Mr. Nguyen refused to address directly to the students he was targeting -he will do this when he is convicted, he said -but he expressed his remorse for the damages he caused to the school. “It was an incredibly great community for me and even regret that my actions painted them in a horrible light,” he said.

Neither the students concerned by Mr. Nguyen, nor their families spoke publicly, and the prosecutors did not protect their privacy through the legal process.

Standing in the courtyard outside his apartment Harlem, Mr. Nguyen vacated between the tear recognition of his violations and the intense occasional explosion of self-analysis. He said he was suffering from a mental illness, a second bipolar disorder, which he said was untreated during the Covid-19 pandemic and that he suffered sexual abuse, but did not apologize for his behavior. “I greatly take responsibility for my actions,” he said. “I made bad decisions.”

Mr. Nguyen was employed as an administrative assistant at Saint Ann’s in the summer of 2020. He alerted the administrator who interviewed that he was convicted of a crime and, at least one employee of Saint Ann, asked the school leaders not to hire him.

He quickly became an indispensable member of the staff, contributing to the management of logistics during the pandemic, while integrated into the school community.

The school promoted Mr. Nguyen to the mathematics teacher in the autumn of 2021, but he did not alert his parents about his criminal record until after the students discovered news about him on the Internet. In October 2021, Vince Tompkins, then the head of the school, sent to the parents an E -mail about the new mathematics teacher. “I can assure you that, as with any teacher we hire, we are confident in Winston’s ability and fitness to educate and care for our students,” he wrote.

Within a year, students from Saint Ann’s and other private schools in Brooklyn – some at the age of 13 – have started receiving requests through Snapchat for photos and Lewd videos. The user behind the anonymous Snapchat accounts sent to a student a graphic video of a 16 -year -old boy masturbating.

Until February 2024, Saint Ann was announced by the Brooklyn District Lawyer’s office that it is investigating the continuous directing of its students by the anonymous Snapchat accounts looking for photos and sexual videos. The school administrators did not announce their parents.

A few days before the end of the school year, Mr. Nguyen was arrested near Saint Ann. He was charged in July with 11 number of crimesIncluding the use of a child in a sexual performance, promoting sexual performance by a child and disseminating indecent materials to a minor.

The news shocked parents and students and led to a media coverage torrent.

In December, Saint Ann launched Findings of an investigation led by lawyers commanded by the School Council to determine how the school came to hire a kind.

The blistering report said that the school administration “ashamed” the parents who expressed their concern about Mr. Nguyen’s background and suggested that they are not in step with the progressive values ​​of the school.

“In some cases,” said the report, the administrators “prioritized the teachers, including NGUYEN for the concerns of the students and their families regarding the teacher’s fund or behavior.”

In the months of the arrest, Mr. Nguyen limited him mostly to his apartment. He takes part in video therapy sessions, including group sessions with other people accused of sexual crimes and participated in occasional church services. Otherwise, it remained isolated, reading and watching television.

He avoided contact with most of his friends, he said, because of his shame and his desire not to burden them. Sometimes, he said, he was tightly depressed and stayed in bed for days.

His sister has recently visited Houston to help her clean her apartment while she is preparing to grow up to the middle age in prison. He brought a lot of Saint Ann sweaters and other school objects from his apartment at school, he said, but a security guard refused to take it. “I do not deserve the family I have,” said Mr. Nguyen.

In recent weeks he has destroyed the objects, he has thrown or donated most of the articles, but for a suit, a Latin dictionary and a pair of ballet slippers signed by a ballerina. While wrapping, he encountered a hot coat during a cold winter by Bernard Stol, the man for whom he worked and stole before his hiring at Saint Ann’s. “People were very, incredibly good for me and I betrayed their confidence in a very deep way,” he said.

He did not want to be tried, he said.

“I am in a place where I know what I did,” he said. “I think some of the reason I feel so horrible is that I don’t know any way I can improve it for children or their families or school. I accept this sentence because I know I did something wrong and I want to answer for it. “