WASHINGTON — A former Montgomery County substitute teacher will go to prison and will have to register as a sex offender for abuse that one victim says began back as far as 2004.
Jose Pineda, a Gaithersburg 50-year-old, pleaded guilty to two counts — one count of sex abuse of a minor and one count of a 3rd degree sex offense. On Friday, a judge sentenced him to 10 years on each count with all but five years suspended.
Judge Joseph Dugan explained the sentences would be concurrent, meaning that Pineda will spend a total of five years in prison, and then will face supervised probation with a number of conditions including having to register as a sex offender every three months for the rest of his life.
The case came to the attention of police in September of 2014 when they got a report that a 12-year-old girl at Roberto Clemente Middle School complained that Pineda had squeezed her buttocks repeatedly as she assisted him in showing a video to a class. He was working as a substitute teacher at the time.
The police investigation resulted in more complaints — one at Ridgeview Middle School where a 12-year-old girl said that in 2013, Pineda, her substitute teacher, slid two fingers up her shorts to touch her buttock. Another Ridgeview Middle School student told police that in 2013, Pineda brushed up against her buttocks repeatedly in class.
Those reports prompted a 23-year-old woman — identified as Victim D — to come forward. She told police that in 2004 she had Pineda as a substitute teacher at Forest Oak Middle School and that Pineda had touched her arm, crouched down to put his hand on her thigh, and then when he stood, he “swiped his hand on her buttocks.”
Pineda’s guilty plea included the incidents at Roberto Clemente and at Forest Oak, where Victim D and her mother took their complaint to then-principal John Burley. Prosecutors say that the 2004 complaint was never forwarded to their office.
At Pineda’s sentencing, Judge Dugan took note of the fact that half the courtroom was filled with Pineda’s relatives and friends — including his sister, Rosa Pineda who stood up to say that she didn’t believe her brother was guilty. She said that she thought he was “100 percent innocent” and suggested that perhaps there had been a misinterpretation of his actions by the victims.
Judge Dugan immediately cut her off, telling her what she was saying “wasn’t helping her brother” and that it might “inflame the victims.” He reminded her that Pineda had pleaded guilty, admitted what he had done was wrong and told her to take her seat.
After the sentencing, the now-23-year-old woman who had been victimized at Forest Oak Middle School told reporters, “I just want to thank God that finally, after all these years, I’m happy that justice was served.”
State’s Attorney John McCarthy was asked about Pineda’s apologies to the victims.
“I’m sure today as he stands there facing going to jail, he’s pretty sorry for what he did. But it didn’t stop him from repeated acts of violating these kids for his own prurient interest for years,” McCarthy said at a news conference after the sentencing.
During the sentencing, Assistant State’s Attorney Tim Hagan told the judge that Pineda should have known what he was doing was wrong. He’d been put on a “do not use list” as recently as 2014 at one middle school, and had been barred from serving as a substitute in the 2005-2006 school year at one high school for “inappropriate conduct” of a sexual nature — conduct Hagan said didn’t rise to criminal behavior, but led to him being barred from that high school.
Hagan didn’t identify which schools were involved. The information came from the county school system’s personnel files.
Pineda’s case was one of several that raised a furor among parents who say that cases of alleged sexual abuse were covered up or reported long after the fact by the school system. The incidents led to the formation of a task force and McCarthy says “the school system is working with us now. I think they recognize that what they did was indefensible.”
McCarthy says the schools are cooperating with his office on dealing with allegations of abuse.
WTOP’s Kate Ryan contributed to this report.
