New details emerge in case of Parkside Elementary child sex abuse case
NAPLES — Newly released documents in the case of Hector Manley, a prolific and determined sexual predator who abused nearly two dozen elementary school children in Collier County’s Public School system, have shed light on how he got away with molesting students for so long.
Among other things, his pattern of predation and many warning signs missed by adults is made clear in the records the Collier County Sheriff’s Office provided to The News-Press / Naples Daily News in response to a public records request.
And according to investigative documents, many in the Parkside community suspected Manley was abusing children, or at least behaving inappropriately, long before he was arrested Feb. 28, 2019. At least five complaints were made of his behavior to parents in the weeks and months before the report that triggered his arrest, in addition to a November 2018 report to school employees.
The News-Press / Naples Daily News analyzed nearly 1,000 pages of summaries of forensic interviews with victims, deputy reports, handwritten parent statements in English and in Spanish, disciplinary emails about Manley and subpoenas submitted by investigators, as well as dozens of crime scene photographs of Manley’s home, classroom and Parkside Elementary, more than a dozen hours of video and audio of witness interviews, and video of Manley’s intake interview at the Collier County Sheriff’s Office upon his arrest.
InvestigationThey thought their children would be safe. A teacher's sex abuse went unreported for years.
Manley, a first-grade teacher at Parkside Elementary and a Naples youth soccer coach, admitted in court January 2022 to molesting at least 19 children as young as 5 years old. Manley was convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison, with credit for the 1,052 days he spent in county jail.
Three charges of sexual battery of children were dropped, despite forensic interviews and medical examinations concluding that Manley had digitally penetrated multiple children. It is not clear why they were dropped; prosecutors and Manley’s defense attorneys declined to speak with The News-Press / Naples Daily News after the conclusion of the case.
Forensic interviews with children he molested show Manley’s abuse wasn’t just contained to Parkside Elementary; his soccer team and work in the community gave him access to children at other schools in the district, too.
Interviews identified possible victims spread out over three elementary schools and one middle school in the Collier County Public School District: Parkside Elementary, Golden Gate Elementary, Calusa Park Elementary and Manatee Middle. Ggiven the dropped charges and anonymity of the list of victims, The News-Press / Naples Daily News could not confirm whether Manley was convicted of abusing children at each school.
Grooming
Collier County Sheriff’s Detective Megan Noel investigated the case, and found evidence that Manley used his Spanish and his understanding of Naples’s Latino community to victimize children of families least likely to report him.
“I think the families he chose, language is an issue,” she said in an interview with a teacher. “Documentation is an issue. He chose the population he knew he could victimize.”
A victim’s mother said in a statement that she trusted him, and “he stated he could help her and do the ‘right thing’ in the Hispanic community.” But behind her back he molested her daughter regularly, both in school and in private, digitally penetrating her multiple times and causing her physical pain, according to the mother's and daughter's statements.
Investigative documents also show Manley routinely went out of his way to become a trusted adult in the Parkside community, far more than was initially known.
Manley volunteered to tutor students, and parent statements indicate he texted or called them daily with updates or questions in their primary language. He contacted them so often, some parents told law enforcement they found it intrusive and asked him to stop. He had special, often intimate nicknames for students and treated them to food or gifts regularly. He bought one girl he victimized sneakers on her birthday, brought another smelly markers, and routinely dropped by his students’ houses uninvited, with bags of McDonald’s Happy Meals to buy his way in.
The newly released documents also reveal that Manley, though disciplined in spring 2018 for worrisome contact with a student through social media, continued to use social media to interact with children. He even used social accounts as a primary medium to communicate soccer practices and game information, essentially forcing children to connect with him through social media.
Victims and parents told law enforcement that he told them afterwards not to let the school know he talked to them through social media, or he could get in trouble.
According to newly released details from the victim interviews, Manley would often reward children after he abused them. Two girls told interviewers that he would give them gummy worms after molesting them; others received birthday presents, trips to the “good” treasure box he typically reserved for the girls at Parkside. Reports say it was filled with stuffed animals and other prizes.
The Children’s Advocacy Center of Collier County helps law enforcement conduct forensic interviews with child abuse victims, conducts medical examinations and more. It assisted Collier County Sheriff’s investigators in the Manley case.
Children’s Advocacy Center CEO Jackie Stephens said that although she couldn’t comment on the Manley case specifically, gift giving, befriending of parents and secret-keeping is typical grooming by sex offenders targeting children.
“People who sexually abuse children do really target children, families and so forth to gain access to children,” Stephens said. “It’s very manipulative. They’ll start the grooming process with parents because they want people to really like them and gain their trust.
“They’re manipulating families, communities and children,” Stephens said. Furthermore, she added, the relationships they’ve developed with their victims make it difficult for victims to report.
“The children oftentimes really care about this person,” Stephens said, and don’t want to get them in trouble. Other times, she said, they’ll threaten children to keep them quiet. The combination of his grooming, his trusted position in the community and his disability worked to confuse those he molested, to the point that some did not realize until much later that he had groped them.
Manley lost his legs at age 11. As an adult, he primarily wore prosthetic legs but would also at times utilize a wheelchair to get around. In interviews, children recounted how he would pull them on his lap while he sat in his wheelchair, and would grope or digitally rape them in front of their classmates. Sometimes, they said, he assaulted them while another student sat on his lap right next to them.
His victims often witnessed him abuse other children and said so in their forensic interviews with child advocates. Identification of one regularly led to identification of several more potential victims.
Others told interviewers they thought his assaults — leaning on their shoulders, pinching, squeezing or otherwise touching their breasts — were the result of him losing his balance on his prosthetic legs. During a witness interview, Noel told a teacher some students were coming forward to report long after his arrest because they were only just realizing that he had assaulted them, too.
A parent raises alarms
It was well-known among students that Manley was a poor instructor, investigative documents show. Multiple children told interviewers that he didn't teach lessons; students would instead play the online game Fortnite, go on their phones or make slime in his class.
Although Manley received E (exceeds expectations) or M (meets expectations) in all his teacher assessments, multiple teachers told investigators Manley was underperforming. The newest trove of documents back up their assertion. In fall 2018, after he was moved to a first-grade position, Parkside principal Tamie Stewart expressed concerns about student performance in meetings and put him on a performance improvement plan.
Stewart’s private emails with him post-meeting made it clear that Manley did not understand the first-grade material he was teaching.
Timeline:A timeline of Hector Manley's sex crimes against Parkside Elementary students in Florida
Parents also noted their children were not learning as quickly as they’d expected them to, but those who tried to address it with the school were unsuccessful.
One mother, a sexual assault survivor, told police she was made uncomfortable by Manley’s behavior toward her and toward her son, who was in his first-grade class. She thought he was too handsy with the children, and his constant texting, calling and trying to contact her through her workplace raised alarms. The final straw came for her during a parent-teacher conference. When she arrived, he met with her in his classroom with the lights out, and told her repeatedly that her son had used the word “pussy;” she believed he was trying to make her uncomfortable.
She told law enforcement she reported him multiple times to the school in his final year of teaching for inappropriate social media contact and overly familiar behavior. She tried to get him disciplined after the parent-teacher conference that unnerved her, and her son moved out of Manley's class.
She said Manley never taught and she saw her son falling behind. In response, she said, the school told her they didn't make classroom assignment changes based on parent judgment and her son would remain in Manley’s class.
Collier County Public Schools did not respond to a request for comment by presstime. The district has repeatedly declined to comment in response to questions concerning the investigative records released to The News-Press / Naples Daily News, citing pending litigation. The school district has said in response to a parent’s lawsuit that it had no way of knowing Manley was abusing children before his arrest nor could it have stopped him.
Reporting and violence
Accounts from students Manley victimized made it clear that he did his best to create confusion, fear or guilt around the assaults in order to prevent students from reporting him.
When assaulting a child in a group — such as pulling a child onto his lap in his classroom, something he did regularly — he took care not to injure the children. One girl described his assaults at school as “soft.” But in private, children told investigators his assaults got more violent and painful. Out of sight of others, he groped one girl until she bled. Others, he pinched roughly, hurting them.
The father of another victim wrote that his daughter said when Manley digitally penetrated her it was painful, “like (he was) punching strongly in(to) her body.”
Multiple children and parents reported to investigators that Manley threatened the children, saying he would kill them –– and sometimes their parents –– if they told anyone. Previously, only one threat was reported in The News-Press / Naples Daily News.
Despite Manley’s efforts, statements from teachers, parents and children over the course of the investigation show children made at least five reports saying Manley was molesting either themselves or other kids to their parents in the months or weeks before the reports that led to his arrest.
During an interview with Parkside’s English Language Learners coordinator Priscilla Rodriguez, Noel told Rodriguez Manley’s abuse was well-known in the Parkside community, and had been even before his arrest.
“I can tell you it was disclosed long before these three girls (reported him in November 2018), to different people: parents, school,” she said. “I mean, people knew. But again, didn’t want to do … the right thing.”
A month before his arrest, one victim disclosed to her mother that Manley was touching other girls on the soccer team. According to her statement, her mother told her it was probably a misunderstanding.
One victim’s mother let her quit the soccer team after she told her mother he had hugged her and she didn’t like it.
One victim who Manley had digitally penetrated until she bled told her mother her vagina hurt. She did not explicitly say Manley had assaulted her. Her mother thought it might be an infection. “Yo no sabía lo que estaba ocurriendo(.) Ella no me dijo nada porque el maestro la amenazó,” her mother wrote in a statement to law enforcement. In English, that translates to: I didn’t know what was happening. She didn’t tell me because the teacher threatened her.
A few weeks before his arrest, one girl told her mother Manley had groped her at school while she was drinking water.
One victim told her mother Manley was touching her friends. A month later, she told her mother she thought he tried to touch her, too. In a statement to law enforcement, the mother wrote how very sorry she was for not saying something sooner.
Rodriguez told Noel that that she had asked for several years for education for children around sexual abuse because parents and kids may not have known what was worth reporting. “Good touch, bad touch, what’s normal to show love for parents, uncles, everybody,” she said. “And nothing was done.” Rodriguez began sobbing into her hands.
Rodriguez could not be reached for comment.
The school district has said in a statement that it does train students in recognizing and responding to grooming behaviors or sexual advances made by adults, and has since before 2018. It has declined to answer questions concerning that training and did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
Resources if you suspect child abuse
Forensic interviews with children he molested show Manley’s abuse wasn’t just contained to Parkside Elementary; his soccer team and work in the community gave him access to children at other schools in the district, too.
In Florida, all adults are mandated reporters, meaning that those who witness or are aware of child abuse and do not report it can be held criminally liable. In Manley’s case, police have not accused anyone of failing to report suspected abuse.
Collier County school sex abuse:Collier County school sex abuse investigation: What happened and how students and parents can seek help
“If someone suspects child abuse … it needs to be investigated,” said Stephens. “Kids can’t protect themselves and these situations can be very manipulative and secretive.”
The Florida Department of Children and Families has an abuse hotline you can call to report abuse in English, Spanish or Creole at 1-800-962-2873 (also known as 1-800-96-ABUSE). For TTY, use 711 or 1-800-955-8771
You can also report abuse online at reportabuse.dcf.state.fl.us/, or call your local sheriff’s office or police department.
Background
School district fires East Naples teacher arrested on molestation charges
Former Parkside Elementary teacher charged with additional counts of molestation
Six more children accuse former Parkside Elementary teacher Hector Manley of molestation
Twentieth child accuses former Parkside Elementary teacher of molestation
Collier County teacher arrested on molestation charges under school review
'You tainted my life': Collier County teacher Hector Manley guilty of molesting 20 children
This article originally appeared on Naples Daily News: Naples teacher child sex abuse: New details in Hector Manley case
