The arrest this week of a security guard on a sexual-assault charge, the second such arrest and charge in 15 days in the Little Rock School District, has prompted the district to re-examine its pre-employment screening process, a spokesman said Tuesday.
On Monday, Miguel Cazares, 43, a substitute security guard, was arrested at his workplace at Henderson Middle School and charged with second-degree sexual assault, stemming from accusations in 2011 and 2012 involving a 7-year-old girl, according to Little Rock police arrest reports.
Cazares, of 7416 Shady Grove in Little Rock, was hired by the school system on Jan. 31, between the time that police investigated the allegations and the time the Pulaski County prosecutor’s office filed charges, according to arrest affidavits and police officials.
His arrest followed the Jan. 29 arrest of Robert Myles, 39, who was hired as a substitute school security guard on April 11, on two counts of seconddegree sexual assault after two students at Horace Mann Middle School told police that he had fondled them while on school grounds in November, according to Little Rock police reports.
District spokesman Pamela Smith said school officials have begun “extensive conversations” about the hiring process to see where the district can improve.
The arrests came on the heels of the district’s decision to add 11 unarmed guards to its 119-guard force to fill manpower needs identified in a districtwide security audit.
The district uses a fourpronged system to check the backgrounds and criminalhistories of all applicants - from janitors to teachers, according to Superintendent Morris Holmes. The district contracts with CS Background in Batesville to do preliminary checks for any arrests and convictions.
An applicant who passes the preliminary check can start work on a probationary basis while his information is put through criminal checks with the Arkansas Department of Education, the Arkansas Department of Human Services and the Arkansas State Police.
Myles and Cazares had both been investigated on sexcrime allegations before the cases that led to their recent arrests, according to arrest affidavits and police reports, but since they were not arrested or charged in those earlier cases, their names wouldn’t have been flagged in preliminary background checks, according to Department of Educationofficials.
The preliminary background check rarely misses detecting any arrests or convictions, Holmes said, but he plans to review the district’s hiring process to see if there is any way that the backgrounding process can detect accusations that did not lead to arrest.
“We will be asking all of those questions and looking for ways we can provide additional protection to keep people who have demonstrated the proclivity in showing pedophilia [out],” he said. “We are accountable to children and parents.”
Cazares and Myles have been fired by the school district, Smith said. Myles’ complete background investigation had not been finished as of Tuesday, according to Katherine Donoven, a staff attorney with the Department of Education. But district officials said preliminary tests detected no problems.
As for Cazares, Donoven said she had no record of any background investigation.
Cazares passed the preliminary background check, Smith said, but had yet to be put through a complete background check.
It’s been a “standard operating procedure” to hire a teacher or security guard on a provisional basis after the preliminary check, especially to fill manpower gaps, Smith said.
But those preliminary checks, or the subsequent checks done by state agencies, wouldn’t have disqualified either Cazares or Myles, who had not been arrested or charged in regard to previous sexual-assault complaints, Donoven said.
State police spokesman Bill Sadler said his agency’s identification bureau, which conducts the background checks, looks for any felony or misdemeanor convictions in the state, as well as arrests in which cases are pending in the courts, and uses information from the FBI for a broader background investigation.
The state police forwards its findings to the Department of Education, which determines whether a job candidate is barred from Education Department employment under state law for either pleading guilty, being found guilty or pleading no contest to a range of violent, property and drug crimes, Donoven said.
The Education Department then notifies the school district whether an applicant is eligible for hire.
If the applicant was the subject of an investigation, Donoven said, it would be hard for background investigators to know that and for her to reject an applicant who has not been arrested or charged.
“We could not use that information as a disqualifying factor,” Donoven said. “By law, that’s how the statute’swritten.”
In April 2012, Cazares was named as a suspect of sexual assault after the young girl’s mother called police and her daughter told officers that Cazares made her sit on his lap and watch pornography in his bedroom, where he assaulted her twice, once in late 2011 and again in March 2012, according to police reports.
During the investigation, detectives learned that Cazares had been questioned in a sexual-assault allegation in Texas, though he was never charged, affidavits said.
Myles was first accused of a sex crime in 2010 when a teenage boy’s mother called the state’s child-abuse hot line and said Myles had inappropriately touched her son, according to a Little Rock police report.
When Little Rock police looked into the teen’s allegations, investigators learned that two other people also had called the child-abuse hot line and made sexual-assault allegations against Myles involving teenage boys.
Those reports had been “screened out,” meaning they did not trigger an investigation, police spokesman Sgt. Cassandra Davis said. The 2010 police report didn’t state why they were screened out, but Davis said that can happen because investigators may not have been able to identify a child victim or the alleged abuse may not have warranted a charge.
State police maintain the hot line, and hot line call-desk operators make the decision on whether to forward a call to a local law enforcement agency or screen it out, Sadler said. Supervisors randomly follow up on the calls, he said.
In the 2010 investigation of Myles, police didn’t have enough evidence at the time to make an arrest, and that case is still under investigation, Davis said.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 11 on 02/15/2013