Thursday, September 13, 2012

Former Teacher's Sex Assault Trial Underway

{Elkins, West Virginia}...Former Elkins Middle School teacher, 29 year old Autumn Rae Faulkner of Beverly, was on trial Thursday in Randolph County Circuit Court, charged with three felony counts of third-degree sexual assault and three felony counts of sexual abuse by a custodian or person of trust to a child after being accused of sexually abusing a student when he was 15. The teenager testified, saying he had sex with her several times in the fall 2008 but ended the relationship after a few months because she wanted to marry him. The student said he met Faulkner when he was in seventh grade but started communicating with her using MySpace the following school year. When he got a cell phone in the ninth grade, the two started texting, sometimes as many as 200 times a day. He says they first had sex at her home on December 21, 2008, after the boy told his father they were going shopping for a Christmas gift for his mother. It happened two other times, he said, but by late February, she was talking about marriage and he broke it off.