Retired Port Coquitlam teacher charged again in sex abuse of students

by: Matthew Robinson

Another round of criminal charges have been laid against a retired B.C. teacher who previously pled guilty to sexually exploiting two young people more than a decade ago.

Russell Lance Read, whose last teaching assignment was at Citadel middle school in Port Coquitlam, was charged last month in connection to five more alleged sex crimes and police believe there may be more victims who have not yet come forward.

Read now faces two charges of sexual assault as well as charges of sexual exploitation, sexual interference of a person under 14, and touching a young person for a sexual purpose.

Read pleaded guilty in 2012 to sexually exploiting two young people and administering a stupefying drug to one of them. One charge related to offences between July 1998 and February 2000 while the other two were between January 2001 and June 2003. Read was charged with sexual exploitation because he was in a position of trust or authority with the victims, Neil MacKenzie of the Attorney General’s criminal justice branch said in an interview, but he wouldn’t say whether they were his students.

The B.C. College of Teachers, previously the profession’s self-regulatory body, cancelled Read’s teaching licence in 2006 for nonpayment of fees and began investigating him for professional misconduct based on confidential information submitted by a school official.

A discipline hearing was held in 2008 and Read admitted to professional misconduct while he was employed as a middle school teacher, including telling inappropriate sexual jokes to Grade 8 students.

The hearing also concluded that he had given a recreational drug to a young female between January 1979 and December 1983 while working as a teacher at a band school. It also determined that he had a sexual encounter with the girl, who was not a student of his but whom he knew to be a minor.

The college barred him from teaching for at least 10 years.

Source: vancouversun