In a disturbing breach of privacy, a former Harper Independent School District assistant band director was charged with invasive recording of a minor. As reported by KSAT, Pedro De Luna III allegedly recorded a 15-year-old girl changing in his home on November 7. The girl discovered his phone actively recording her while she changed clothes in a bathroom, according to her statement provided in the arrest affidavit.
The girl and her mother, after being invited over after a Harper High School football game, went to De Luna's residence, with the victim's sibling and mother arriving about ten minutes apart. De Luna had claimed to 'clean' the bathroom prior, which is where the recording device was ostensibly placed, as further detailed in the affidavit published by News 4 San Antonio. The girl stopped the recording and informed her mother of the incident outside of De Luna's home, precipitating a confrontation where De Luna allegedly claimed he accidentally dropped his phone in the bathroom.
The Harper ISD has since identified De Luna as a former staff member and emphasized that the alleged recording took place off campus and outside of school hours. When confronted about the incident, De Luna admitted to deleting items from his phone but reasoned that these were images of his wife. Gillespie County investigators, upon searching De Luna's phone, noted several items had been recently deleted and that his search history started again with queries on "how to retrieve deleted videos," as noted by KSAT.
Even though no videos of the victim were found on the phone, details from the arrest affidavit highlight suspicious activities such as the phone being set on "Do Not Disturb" during the time of the alleged recording, and the phone's camera was accessed shortly after. Despite placing his phone in the corner of the room purposely, De Luna claimed that his camera had not been working, which the investigators found to be at odds with the phone's recorded event data. After booking De Luna on Monday, he was released the next day on bond, as per KSAT.
