East End Gym Teacher To Be Sentenced Wednesday For Recording Teens
Riverhead, NY - December 17, 2013 - Thomas Sheppard, the former Westhampton Middle School gym teacher from Speonk who used his cellphone to record girls in a locker room will be sentenced tomorrow (December 18, 2013) in criminal court in Riverhead, Suffolk County District Attorney Thomas Spota said today.
Sheppard pleaded guilty in October to all of the counts in an eight-count indictment: one felony count of unlawful surveillance in the second degree, and seven counts of endangering the welfare of a minor.
District Attorney Spota said he will recommend the maximum one and one-third to four years imprisonment; the court is expected to sentence Sheppard, 28, to five years of probation.
He will surrender his teaching license and Judge Barbara Kahn directed the defendant register as a sex offender.
DA Spota said it was clear “from the beginning the recording of these girls was not inadvertent as the defendant first claimed.”
The court calendar for Judge Kahn starts at 9:30 am.