The sentencing of Huntington Beach couple and retired teachers Daniel Alma Shepard and Gay Davidson-Shepard, who have been convicted of sexually tag-teaming a then-17-year-old male student, was delayed last week because prosecutors objected to a proposed plea deal.
The hearing was postponed from Thursday to Nov. 1.
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Davidson-Shepard, 60, was a teacher at Mesa
View Middle School in Huntington Beach and her 63-year-old husband
was a science teacher at Westminster High School, where he met the
student before the couple “groomed” the teen in March 2009 by inviting
him to their Huntington Beach home for food, alcohol, movies and board
games.
The couple sexually assaulted the boy for the first time the following month
at their home, getting into a hot tub naked, with Davidson-Shepard later getting out of the
water and giving the boy and his science teacher blow jobs.
Sex games would continued weekly, with the teen first plied with
alcohol before the mutual masturbating, oral copulating, fucking and
anal began. Daniel Shepard sexually
assaulted the boy through September 2009, while his wife kept at it
through December of that year, when he turned 18, the age of consent.
In March 2011, the teen told his mother what had happened, she contacted
the Westminster Police Department, and the couple was arrested the
following month. Former Huntington Beach teacher union
president Gay Davidson-Shepard later contacted the teen in violation of a protective
order.
Under a
deal
with Judge John S. Adams in Westminster, the Shepards in August copped to felonies that would normally draw prison sentences of 5-8 years, but there were indications His Honor would instead order the couple to serve three years
probation and 60 hours of community service
and undergo mandatory counseling.
Deputy District Attorney Nicole Varner
objected to the proposed sentence, so Adams set the November hearing to
give the defense time to study the prosecution's motion.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.