Family sues Goodyear school where teacher allegedly molested student
Jan 22, 2019, 4:30 PM | Updated: Jan 23, 2019, 10:14 am
Brittany Zamora (MCSO Photo)
(MCSO Photo)
PHOENIX — The parents of the 13-year-old boy who was allegedly molested by sixth-grade teacher Brittany Zamora have filed a lawsuit against Liberty Elementary School District, as well as Zamora’s husband.
The lawsuit alleges that Zamora, 27, used a school district resource called Classcraft to talk to students outside of school, including the boy she is accused of molesting at Las Brisas Academy.
It also claims that she used school district social media accounts to send explicit images to the boy, and that multiple instances of sexual activity occurred on school grounds in Zamora’s classroom.
“Had the school monitored this application, it would have known what was going on between Brittany Zamora and this sixth grader long before anything inappropriate had taken place,” Steven Weinberger, one of the lawyers who is representing the student and his family, told KTAR News 92.3 FM.
According to the lawsuit, several teachers and three students reported inappropriate behavior between the teacher and student, but the principal did not further investigate or relay the information to the boy’s parents or law enforcement.
The boy’s stepmother first discovered that Zamora had been sending the boy inappropriate text messages through a monitoring app that alerted her to sexual keywords, then later found out about the alleged sexual conduct.
She reported to this to the principal, who then informed the Goodyear Police Department.
The boy’s parents are accusing the school district of negligence for failing to monitor its social platforms, failing to investigate reports about Zamora’s behavior and failing to relay those reports to law enforcement, as the suit states is required by state law.
Lawsuit on Scribd
The lawsuit also states that Daniel Zamora, the teacher’s husband, should have been aware of his wife’s actions and was negligent for not reporting that his wife was sexually involved with a minor.
The suit claims that he tried to harass the boy’s parents into not reporting the molestation to police.
There was no amount of money specified in the lawsuit, but the notice of claim, a precursor to a lawsuit, asked for $2.5 million.
Zamora was charged with sexual conduct with a minor, molestation and transmission of obscene material in March.
She graduated from Arizona State University in 2013 and was pursuing a master’s degree from Grand Canyon University.
KTAR News 92.3 FM’s Ashley Flood contributed to this report.
