A Christian high school teacher in Washington state has been sentenced to six months of house arrest for having a sexual relationship with a student.
Lindsey Westerfield, 31, pleaded guilty to several counts of first-degree sexual misconduct with a minor at Cascade Christian High School in 2019.
Detectives opened an investigation into her years ago, but progress was stalled until 2022 when they learned she was trying to work on the charter school commission.
It was then that the victim, now 23, also came forward with additional details about their encounters.
Two of the encounters Westerfield was ultimately charged with occurred after the victim turned 18. But in Washington, state law prohibits sexual relationships between students under the age of 21 and school employees who are at least five years their senior.
Westerfield resigned from her position at the Christian academy in 2019, shortly after the investigation was opened.
In addition to house arrest, the former teacher will be required to register as a sex offender for a decade, as well as undergoing unrelated treatment for four-and-a-half years.
The teacher and victim communicated via Snapchat, and met up at one another’s houses and in parking garages – and even once after the school’s junior-senior ball.
The encounters never occurred on school grounds, according to the International Business Times.
When the investigation began, the student – who was then 18 – said he had an emotional relationship with Westerfield, but would not admit to any sexual activity.
It was three years before the student coughed up additional helpful information.
During that period, the former student’s father told police that the relationship between his son and Westerfield had been on-and-off for a while, and that there was a time when the student went so far as to drop out of college to get a job to support her.
Two years ago, an investigator from the Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction reached out to the local Puyallup police after Westerfield attempted to get a job with the state’s charter school operation.
Several months later, the investigator told police that Westerfield had surrendered her education license and been fired from her job.
After her firing, a local detective contacted the victim’s father to share the news. The parent said his son, who had returned to college, might be willing to discuss his history with Westerfield in more detail.
The victim subsequently described multiple sexual encounters between the two of them and the lengths the pair went to to keep them a secret.
He said he was ‘pretty horrified’ in retrospect, and that he ultimately cut off all communications with Westerfield in 2020 after the relationship ended for the final time.
As part of her sentence, Westerfield was ordered to have zero contact with the victim and is forbidden from holding any position in which she supervises minors under the age of 13.