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| Teacher pleads guilty to sex charges |
| By news-record.com |
| Published: 03/21/2011 |
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Kevin Ricks, a UNC-Chapel Hill graduate, spent his 30-year teaching career shaping young minds with classic literature. He will spend the next 25 years in federal prison, convicted of sexually abusing more than a dozen young men in North Carolina and across the globe. Ricks, a Roanoke Rapids native, pleaded guilty last week in a federal court in Virginia. His charges largely centered on production and possession of child pornography. His trail, extensively documented in a Washington Post report in July, was far more sordid and extensive. Several men told the Post that he had photographed and molested them as boys, after plying them with tequila to solidify their friendships. Ricks' reach was far and wide. After graduating from UNC-CH, he worked as a teacher, in public and private schools, in North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland and Japan for 30 years. He also tutored boys privately and hosted exchange students from Europe and Asia. "This case is a chilling reminder to parents and kids that the face of evil is often the familiar and everyday, and even a seeming respected role model," Neil H. MacBride, U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, said in a prepared statement. When police in Manassas, Va., searched Ricks' home in February, they found an abundance of evidence. He had collected photographs of the boys and detailed his relationships with them in an extensive collection of private journals. Police used these clues to find his victims, some of whom did not realize they had been abused. Two of the victims had been abused in North Carolina, according to federal court documents. In the documents, the victims are not named. According to court documents, when Ricks was 19, he worked as a counselor at a camp for children with disabilities in Virginia. He befriended an 11-year-old camper who was deaf; Ricks also befriended the child's family and offered to bring the boy to live with him for a period in Roanoke Rapids. Investigators say he extensively molested the boy during that visit. Then, in 1981, while a student at UNC-CH, Ricks molested a 12-year-old boy he befriended. Ricks took the boy to visit his grandparents in Conway, where he molested him. Ricks was given a temporary teaching certification in North Carolina and taught in Burlington in the 1996-97 school year. None of the charges settled last week relate to his time as a teacher in North Carolina. As part of the plea arrangement, Ricks is obliged to tell officials the names of every boy he hurt. The plea bargain spares victims from having to testify about their abuse in court. It also settles any state investigations in North Carolina. Roanoke Rapids police charged Ricks with taking indecent liberties with a child last year after being contacted by Virginia authorities about the case involving the camper. Jim Woodall, district attorney in Orange County, said his office was contacted about the victim Ricks abused when he was at UNC-CH. Woodall said he deferred to federal authorities to prosecute. Read More. |
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