A 34-year-old Colorado middle school secretary is on the run after authorities accused her of sexually abusing a 13-year-old student for months, including grooming the boy with alcohol and marijuana as they met at a Walmart parking lot.
Authorities in Greely, Colorado have been unable to locate Brenda Meza since an initial interview in which she allegedly confessed to detectives how she seduced and then had sex with the eighth-grader from Franklin Middle School, according to an arrest affidavit obtained by the California Post.
The police department in Greely, a city of 114,000 some 60 miles north of Denver, earlier this month announced Meza was “currently wanted on several Felony charges.”
Meza, who also coaches the cross-country team and advises the games club, told police that she became infatuated with the boy and would even get jealous if he talked to girls his own age in school, according to the Post, which spared no salacious detail in its report of the arrest document.
Meza reportedly told the boy she felt like she knew him “from another life,” a claim the teenager told police he thought that idea was “corny.”
An anonymous tipster reportedly alerted school officials about Meza’s relationship with the teen in early February. After school officials confronted her, she went home and confessed to her husband who reported her to the police, according to the Post.
The affidavit reports a pattern of grooming behavior typically found in educator sexual misconduct cases where the perpetrator is female and the victim a male. It included a series of provocative exchanges between the two and sexting lewd photographs after the two connected on Thanksgiving break last year.
Everything escalated in January when Meza purchased marijuana edibles and ready-to-drink cocktails for the pair to consume when they met in a Walmart parking lot, leading to sexual intercourse, police said.
A couple weeks later they repeated the same at a local park, with the secretary dropping the boy off at his home that evening afterwards.
The victim, who has attended Franklin for two years, also told detectives that they had a third such encounter at the same park.
Meza worked as a substitute teacher prior to becoming a secretary at Franklin in 2020, according to school officials, who has since been terminated from employment in late February in the district.
By then, however, she’d already disappeared.
Greeley police plan to charge the educator with 12 felonies, including sexual assault of a child, internet luring of a child, and contributing to the delinquency of a minor, according to the Post.
Veteran crime writer Lowell Cauffiel is the author of the New York Times true crime best seller House of Secrets , which documents one of the worst cases of child sex abuse in U.S. history, and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.
