A former South Florida middle school teacher pleaded guilty to sex crimes involving a 14-year-old ex-student. Brittiny Lopez-Murray, 33, was slapped with a plea deal earlier today, admitting to six charges, including lewd and lascivious battery and lewd and lascivious molestation of a child, as reported by NBC Miami.
The ex-educator, once deemed a "rookie teacher of the year" at Hialeah Middle School, will serve two years of community control, followed by ten years of probation. She is further compelled to forever register as a sex offender and must seek treatment for mental disorder sex offenders. Lopez-Murray's fall from grace began in October 2021, after she was accused of having a sexual relationship with the teenager, whom she taught in the past.
Detailed within a police report is an affair that began in August 2021, moving swiftly from coffee to car sex acts in seedy locales such as mall and grocery store parking lots. The unraveling of Lopez-Murray's offstage drama started when the victim's sister found "explicit text messages and photos" on his phone, a discovery that prompted the teenager's father to escalate the situation to police, as obtained by CBS Miami.
The judge's order came two years after Lopez-Murray was arrested and then released on bond, having been instructed to stay far away from the underage victim. Arrest reports allege multiple sexual encounters over a two-month span, starting in August, some two years prior. Lopez-Murray, who had been at the helm of classroom instruction at Hialeah Middle School for four years, is now facing a litany of charges that will utterly erase her once-promising career in education.
The school district has made it clear that her termination is in progress, almost ensuring that the echoes of her accolade of 'Rookie Teacher of the Year' will soon be drowned out by the heavy gavel of justice and the infamy of her actions.
