Part 2 of 5
SEAGOVILLE — The cellphone looked like a gift. The messages that followed told a child to keep secrets from his parents.
In a San Antonio federal case, fifth-grade teacher Keisha Lyn Swarner gave a 13-year-old boy a phone and used it to direct sexual conduct involving a 12-year-old girl. Prosecutors said she facilitated meetings at her home and instructed him not to tell his parents.
Swarner pleaded guilty to sexual performance by a child. In September 2024, she received 325 months in prison—27 years and one month—followed by 30 years of supervised release.
The federal account did not identify the children as her students. It documented how an educator used a gift, private communication and secrecy to facilitate exploitation.
Other Texas convictions reveal similar tools in different settings: prepaid cards from a band instructor, a coach’s late-night attention, payments for sexual recordings and a second phone destroyed after discovery.
The criminal act was often preceded by a relationship that the child experienced as support, affection or special treatment.
What researchers found before the abuse
A 2025 study by Elizabeth Jeglic and Georgia Winters examined the experiences of 24 adult survivors who identified an educator as their abuser.
All reported at least one grooming behavior. In the researcher’s published summary, 83% reported selection of a child who was especially compliant or trusting of adults; 71% described the educator as charming, likable or nice; and 67% reported receiving substantial attention.
Two-thirds also reported seemingly innocent touching. One-third of the educators in that small sample were coaches or physical education teachers.
Those findings are not population estimates for Texas schools. The sample was small and retrospective. They describe experiences among people already identified as survivors, not a test that can determine whether any particular teacher is dangerous.
The distinction is essential. Kindness, encouragement and academic support are ordinary parts of good teaching. In the prosecutions, those interactions developed into private access, sexual communications, manipulation or demands for secrecy.
The instructor who gave students phones
Brandon Neil Sams worked as a band instructor at Texas High School in Texarkana. According to information presented in federal court, he communicated with several minor students through social media and messaging applications to induce sexual activity.
He supplied gifts, including cellphones, clothing and prepaid credit cards.
After school police uncovered his conduct, other victims reported previous abuse. Prosecutors said some had feared backlash if they spoke.
Sams pleaded guilty to coercion and enticement of a minor and received 25 years in federal prison in July 2024.
The gifts were part of the prosecution’s explanation of how he encouraged compliance. His access to students gave him opportunities; the private exchanges extended that access beyond a supervised lesson.
The students’ reported fear of backlash also complicates the assumption that a child will immediately identify an adult’s conduct as abuse and tell someone. In this case, additional accounts emerged only after the investigation was underway.
A coach became the person she depended on
In Perryton, Cole Underwood’s victim described a coach who became a confidant during a stressful period.
Prosecutors said he used Snapchat to develop the connection and arrange sexual encounters. Investigators found late-night conversations, some lasting more than six hours.
The 15-year-old told the sentencing court that he isolated her and continually pressured her for sex.
“I genuinely thought that he actually cared about me,” she said.
Underwood pleaded guilty to enticement of a minor and received 30 years in federal prison in February 2025.
The superintendent had contacted law enforcement after concerns arose. Surveillance showed the coach opening an exterior door, turning off lights and meeting the student inside the school despite a directive against being alone with her.
His case connects emotional dependence to physical opportunity. The private communications and access to an office were parts of the same course of conduct.
The second phone investigators could not recover
Nicholas Dominique Bueno, a teacher and coach at O’Donnell High School, exchanged thousands of messages with a 14-year-old student over a period of less than a month in 2022.
Federal prosecutors described the communications as controlling, sexual and designed to entice her.
When questioned, Bueno initially denied communicating with the child outside school. He later admitted using another phone and destroying it after the conduct was discovered.
He received 20 years in federal prison in October 2023 following an enticement conviction and guilty pleas to three counts of transferring obscene material to a minor.
A school administrator reported the allegations to the sheriff’s office, and federal authorities credited the district’s assistance.
The destroyed device shows one reason a school cannot assume that its own email or messaging records contain the full relationship. An employee can maintain a separate channel outside the systems administrators ordinarily review.
Money offered for exploitation
In Abilene, former preschool teacher Mark Penfield Eichorn offered a child $100 a week and paid two victims hundreds of dollars to produce sexually explicit recordings, according to federal prosecutors.
He pleaded guilty to producing child sexual abuse material and received 30 years in federal prison in April 2025.
At the time of his arrest, he worked at a local private school. The federal announcement does not establish that the two victims attended that school.
Here, the inducement was explicitly financial. The recordings also created a continuing form of exploitation: the evidence consisted of material documenting what children had been induced to do.
That case differs from a teacher abusing a student during class. It belongs in the same broader examination because school employment and criminal exploitation can coexist without the misconduct being confined to school property.
An adult pretending to be a teenager
Juan Carlos Munoz used a false online identity while working as a high school special education teacher in the Rio Grande Valley.
A South Carolina family discovered that its 14-year-old daughter was communicating with someone soliciting sexual images. The person claimed to be 19. Investigators traced the communications to Munoz, who was in his 40s.
He admitted communicating with approximately 50 minors and requesting explicit photographs and videos. He received 14 years in federal prison in September 2024 for coercion and enticement.
Those minors were not identified in the announcement as his students.
His case shows another route around a family’s judgment: rather than exploiting a visible teacher’s authority, he concealed his adult identity entirely.
When a child wants to protect the offender
In Laredo, testimony in Adriana Rullan’s trial described a boy who viewed the teacher as his girlfriend and initially wanted to protect her. He had been 13 when the relationship began.
Reporting described messages, gifts and money. Rullan was convicted and received a 33-year sentence in July 2026.
A child’s attachment does not remove the adult’s responsibility. It can make disclosure more difficult and leave parents confronting both abuse and a child’s distress at losing someone he believed cared for him.
Across the cases, the evidence included gifts, messages, money, surveillance and children’s accounts. No single detail explains every offense. Together, they demonstrate why examining the progression of a relationship matters more than waiting for a child to use legal terminology.
For Seagoville and Crandall families, the practical institutional question is whether schools can identify and act on private channels, exclusive attention and unexplained access before those patterns become a criminal case.
Tomorrow, the next article examines what happened when warnings did reach other adults—and why a report inside a school sometimes failed to produce the protection parents expected.
