THE
ESCAPE
As soon as I left the meeting with Williams,
I texted Stef
I tried to collect myself as I climbed the three flights of stairs to the 6th grade floor.
I was supposed to be
in the front office conference room writing a statement,
but I dipped out.
I figured they’d be too busy with the investigation to worry about the
insurance policy forced confession
list of names and behaviors.
As soon as I get to the top of the stairs,
I realized no one had given instructions about what to do with students.
I texted two APs about it:
Dr. Jones (now Dr. Turk I guess?)
↪ “Ok, not sure what to do about bringing students back to my room…I don’t really want to bring students to sit in a room that’s potentially dangerous”
Ms. Brady
↪ “What should I do in terms of bringing students back to my room?
They both tell me to ask Williams, which wasn’t very helpful to be honest. Because, like I told you,
I just sat in the principal’s office
and got chewed out
for like an hour and a half…
I texted Williams directly —
No answer.
FFS, how is she confused by that?
I needed an answer. Students were about to kick down my door to ask me:
Where have I been,
I was in the principals office getting chewed out.
can they go to their locker,
Still no.
and if I think they’ll pass the SOL.
I mean, you see how review is going…
So I went downstairs to get an answer and explain to Williams “what I mean”
I guess?
When I get to the office, I wander around looking for Williams like you do when you forget where you parked your car...
Slightly worried, head on a swivel, wondering how you even got here
When I find her, I interrupt her conversation from a distance, using slightly louder than an ‘inside voice’
“What should I be doing, ma’am?”
No answer. She just freaking stares at me dead-faced like a toddler watching you walk by. But angrier and less stunned.
Wait, hold up, that might be disdain…
I recognized the move, obviously, she was refusing to answer because she wants assert dominance and intimidate me… I just wasn’t sure why.
She was glaring at me
like the answer is obvious.
Maybe she forgot how questions work?
“So… just take kids back to class?” She nods and says “Yup. Business as usual”
Wait, huh?
She turned away, continued her conversation. I was clearly being dismissed. I turned and went up the three flights of stairs. Again.
Straight away, I went to talk with a teacher I trusted and was close with at the time.
(I accidentally captured our conversation, I didn’t know my phone was still recording from the meeting with Williams)
Stef hates that I never lock my phone screen.
In the audio you can barely hear me say:
"So when I left and went downstairs its because I realized I gotta ask Williams what she wants me to do. And then she, and she knew that I had swiped a desk in my classroom this morning, that it had been positive, she told me to go back into the room with students, she sent me back into the room." —
“Isn’t admin going to investigate?”
“I don’t know…I mean I think. I don’t know.”
Then I went to my room before students come crashing through my door. asking where I’ve been.
She sent me back in the room.
Didn’t she just grill me for not reporting sooner?
She sent me back in the room.
Just teach in here like this morning didn’t happen?
She sent me back in the room.
I just assumed they’d move me to an empty classroom or something until admin could look into it. Instead, Williams sent me back into a potentially dangerous space to teach.
Meanwhile, I’m taking my best guess at the most contaminated desks and shoving them into the corner of the classroom,
like an idiot.
This is the stupidest plan ever…
I texted back and forth with the teacher I trusted and was close with at the time —
I made it through my last two bells and was sitting in my room during planning period when I had the thought:
It would be really hard to explain how a teacher was at his desk while potentially surrounded by trace amounts of cocaine (that he just reported so definitely knows about) and he’s just sitting there working on SOL review materials.
Did I mention SOL review was going poorly this year?
So I got up and started blitzing the room (well, just the area around my desk) with cleaner I lifted off a custodian’s cart when they weren’t looking.
More texts back and forth with Stef —
By the time the bell rang at the end of the day, the school felt like the cave of wonders after Abu tries to lift forbidden treasure…
that shadowy tiger-looking sand monster who guards the entrance and is always shouting, does not mess around
I split right after the bell rang, I was skipping bus duty for sure.
I always skip bus duty…
Before I left, I grabbed a civics notebook off the ground and stood it up on end, two tiles in, right on the other side of the door.
Williams had been ice cold so it didn’t seem likely that she would update me on my classroom situation... At least now I would know for sure if someone came in and cleaned overnight.
On my way home, I called an AP from a different school in the district and walked him through the situation.
FULL DISCLOSURE
This conversation was recorded for personal use, so I could listen back. The person I spoke to always uses the right language in the right contexts and the next time I (inevitably) had to explain this mess, I wanted to get it right. It was off the record as a mentor so I am not going to publish the audio but I pulled some quotes from the transcript.
“So let me ask you this. Did you confront any student about what you found? Or ask them questions?”
“No man, of course not”
“OK, so you're fine. You're absolutely in the clear, but go ahead”
“So, Williams just frickin' grilled me the whole time. She's saying like, I should have reported everything directly, immediately. And like, but I'm, I'm like, I have nothing to report, except for what I said.”
“So she's doing what she knows to do at a different level. So she's clear at her level, but you're clear at your level.”
“But the whole conversation was like, ‘I should have known’ but there's nothing in the, in the staff handbook or whatever that addresses this shit”
“Let me tell you one thing about you, man. You are way smarter than the system. Okay, one, and I'm just putting to you blunt, since we're off record. You are way smarter than the system, and you have to remember that. You're getting in your own head. You're forgetting who you are… because who you are is absolutely no way that you should be panicking like this.”
“I know man, I mean maybe. But I’m tellin’ you the meeting with Williams was so weird.”
Then he says the quiet part out loud.
“This is Exhibit A man, nobody wants WAVY TV-10. Nobody wants this to be real. If anything you’re, you'll be helping them to dismiss it by stating you don't you know if... of course I don't want to put words in your mouth, but just to give you the general idea that nobody wants this to be a thing.”
Before I go on
to tell you what happened when I went back the next morning, let me tell you what we found out about what happened just a few hours after I reported on the 12th.
Well, not everything we’ve found out.
Not all at once... that’s assault.
What we learned is:
I was on edge for good reason.
On May 12th, a felony criminal investigation was opened and worked at 2500 Rogers St. -- Oscar Smith Middle School at 2:55 PM responding to a reported drug offense charge of "DISTRIB/SELL FOR PROFIT SCH I OR II" NARCOTICS"
SUMMARY
Police were actively involved in a criminal ivestigation of a felony drug charge only a few hours after I reported safety concerns related to narcotics to OSM admin.
on the same day,
at the same location,
What a coincidence!
This is the CAD history report for the investigation (it’s the opperational diary that’s logged during a police response).
SUMMARY
Police opened a felony-level investigation in response to a reporting person (“rp”) that called from inside the school and stated “a teacher is dealing drugs to students.”
on the same day,
at the same location,
What a coincidence.
FACT
A few hours after I share concerns with my administration, a report was made from within the school that claimed "a teacher selling drugs to students"
Distribution of narcotics to minors is a felony charge that carries a 10 year minimum sentence.
I didn’t know until months later :
Officers responded at the scene and were actively investigating the reported felony drug distribution
That investigation was open up until after I leave work on the 13th (for the last time.)
Both the identity of the caller/ANONYMOUS WITNESS and the subject of the investigation are redacted.
I was sent back into my room. Twice.
INFERENCE
I cannot say with certainty that I was the subject
but,
I mean…
and I cannot say with certainty who the caller is. So we don’t know…
but we can guess...
Tuesday morning
May 13th,
I was stuck in traffic on
my way to work.
I freaking hate being stuck anywhere, but the worst place is in traffic.
My family and I stay in Norfolk.
Oscar Smith is in South Norfolk which is in Chesapeake, which is confusing.
South Norfolk is seperated from Norfolk by an arbitrary line drawn through Campostella. Historically and culturally though, its the same difference.
In the mornings, if I catch most of the lights on Tidewater
and don’t find some unpredictable, impulsive reason to stop
I can make it from the house to my classroom door in sixteen minutes
A third of my commute is inside the building (Smith is huge and my classroom is farthest you can possibly be from the front door.)
I didn’t make any of the lights on Tidewater Drive because
half of it was underwater.
It floods pretty regularly
on the southern side
of the Princess Anne innersection
and again down in Brambleton
near Harbor Park
and all that,
in front of Rufner Middle
you know what I’m talking about.
So I’m salty about the traffic,
plus I’m in this borrowed car because we just never decided to get mine fixed. We didn’t decide not to, we just never did it.
and it’s super kind of our friends to let us borrow it but the damn radio’s broke.
So its wet and quiet and I tried to remember what the AP told me at the end of our conversation the day before
He Who Must Not Be Named
“You did the right thing and you need to stand on that and you need to believe that within yourself so that you can communicate that to others in your heart. You did the right thing, At the end of the day, if you need to hang your hat and drop a mic, when you walk out the door say: Everything I did was for the safety of my students. And if they wanna challenge it, we all make mistakes, man...See your saving grace is this: You did not accuse a child of anything.”
which turned out to be dead ass wrong.
at the time, it sounded nice
-
THE OLD BEHIND-THE-DOOR CIVICS NOTEBOOK ALARM SET-UP
I arrive at school and go straight to my door and look through the window. The freaking notebook is still there.
Shit.
I opened the door and barely get unpacked. There was SOL testing on the 13th. Any morning there’s a state test, it’s chaos.
Students are always overwhelmed by anxiety because staff are always overly lenient with students (which isn’t actualy a comfort to students… but it feels better to not enforce expectations)
The state has been breathing down our neck for a decade. And it shows. At Smith the culture that surrounds testing is about what you’d expect after years of constant threat. That, combined with an inherited perspective that is born of scarcity and desperation.
Like every testing day, I write students’ names and the room # they are going to be testing in, on post-it notes and stick them on the door for kids to grab, so they don’t forget.
The hope is to mitigate some of the fallout from the shock of a facing a different schedule.
even though they were reminded repeatedly for months.
I go back and write inside jokes
and encouragement on the post-its
after I’ve hung them up
When I’m finished, I look up and ,
AH!
Williams is standing against the lockers right across the hall from my room.
I don’t know why she’s here but I know for a fact this is only the second time shes been up on the third floor all year...
And
Well, let’s just say she wasn’t there to see how I’m holding up.
It felt like she was there to intimidate me.
I started to notice some staff looking at me. I mean I’ve been looked at before, I tend to attract attention on occasion… but this was different. There was no kindness in their eyes. Those handful of people were looking at me sideways, it left me feeling like I was being watched.
or glared at
Let me be clear, I didn’t think other staff were about to jump me and steal my lunch money or whatever. I wasn’t looking over my shoulder all paranoid… But I did think that a specific group of staff people were looking at me like they knew something was about to happen to me and I deserved it.
That also put me on edge.
I was sure something was off (you know the feeling where you just know something bad is about to happen…) I was so sure of it that halfway through proctoring the test, I went to the faculty bathroom, turned my phone on, and texted Stef to call the school with an excuse for why I needed to leave work and come home.
There is something I should mention about my meeting with Williams:
During our meetig, she seemed fixated on “items I thought might be suspicious” that I removed from my classroom.
The SRO and I talked the week before about collecting items to be tested. I collected items and brought them downstairs at dismissal,
but when I got down the stairs, the SRO wasn’t there.
I wasn’t comfortable bringing the items back upstairs,
so I put them in the back of my car.
She repeatedly asked about the items in my car and those items could no longer be used. “They’re no good now”
She spells out the chain‑of‑custody issue:
“To take stuff you suspect is from your classroom, put it in your car, and then bring it back to Officer Sabattis? Officer Sabattis can’t do anything with this…”
So here is what we can say with certainty about the May 12th felony distribution charge:
FACT
On May 12, 2025, CPD recieves a 911 call-for-service from Oscar Smith MIddle School: “rp states a teacher is dealing drugs to students in the school… would like to make a report over the phone with the SRO… scared to go to [the office] due to her safety.”
The CAD history shows officers searching for information tied to a Driver’s License using queries that are used to find license plate numbers
SUMMARY
In my meeting with Williams on May 12th, I told her about the suspicious items from my classroom in my car.
On the same day (May 12th),
at the same location (OSM),
CPD received a report that logs this complaint:“a teacher is dealing drugs to students in the school”
The CAD shows officers ran queries with results that include driver’s license, lisense plates, registration, etc. shortly after. (DL/VCIN lookups are a common precursor to locating someone’s vehicle registration information)
INFERENCE
Given: A) Williams’ repeatedly mentions the potentially contaminated items in my car B) the emphasis on stating that I mishandled those items and C) the complete lack of police presence inside the building, It is reasonable to suggest that the focus of the criminal investigation was centered on the driver’s license numbers queries that corresponds with the information used to identify the owner of a vehicle registered under the name of a specific subject.
You know, like the name of a guy who just disclosed that he removed “items he thought were potentially suspicious” from his classroom and put them in his car.
So,
I cannot claim that I was the subject of the
criminal investigation with any certainty.
What I can claim with certainty is:
the police couldn’t have found a vehicle registered under my name at the school that day…
I was driving a borrowed car.
THE
RECEIPTS
-
THE ESCAPE - RECEIPTS GRID
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Police report #25-58320 case-Redacted
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25-58320 CAD History-Redacted
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Police report #25-58320 SUPP-Redacted
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ONE PAGE ARGUMENT MAP