A church volunteer who had an illicit sexual relationship with a 15-year-old boy at her congregation for nine months has dodged jail.
Reagan Danielle Gray, 27, sent naked pictures ‘on a daily basis’ to the boy after they met at Immanuel Baptist Church in Little Rock, Arkansas.
But they never went further than oral sex during their illegal affair between September 2020 and May 2021, because Gray wanted the teen to ‘stay pure’.
Gray, who was at the time a teacher at Sylvan Hills Middle School, pleaded no contest to second-degree sexual assault in a plea bargain on Monday.
Judge LaTonya Honorable sentenced her to six years probation and a $1,000 fine in the Sixth Judicial Circuit Court. Gray will also have to register as a sex offender.
Gray was originally charged last August with first-degree sexual assault as she was in ‘a position of trust or authority’ over the boy.
She was fired by the Pulaski County Special School District soon after the charges were laid.
The boy’s family sued the church in December for negligence, negligent hiring, negligent supervision, and negligent retention.
The teen’s parents said they were ‘grateful that our son has one less painful load to carry’ in a statement after Gray was sentenced.
‘What’s difficult to reconcile is how many adults repeatedly failed him – people with power, responsibility, or influence who looked the other way. Institutions that protected themselves,’ they said.
‘Systems that made justice harder than it should have been.’
The court heard Gray met the boy at the church, one of the biggest in Arkansas and once attended by former president Bill Clinton, where he was also a member of the student ministry.
He told detectives that Gray found his phone number through the group chat for the church’s music program.
The church sent her for counseling after the boy’s parents discovered text messages alluding to the affair on their son’s phone, but she was welcomed back within weeks and resumed her abuse.
The pair met in her car and in her Monticello apartment until May 2021 but the boy told investigators he could not remember if he responded to her demands for naked images in response to her torrent of nude photos.
‘I don’t have explicit memory of doing that but, with how often she requested it, it probably did happen,’ he admitted.
The boy’s parents confronted Gray and informed head pastor Steven Smith after discovering a series of text messages.
Smith said he confronted Gray and suspended her from student ministry despite her insistence that her relationship with the boy was not sexual.
The police were not informed and the church assigned Gray an ‘accountability partner’ – Smith’s wife Ashley.
But Gray resumed her abuse after returning from her counselling, switching her communications with the boy to Snapchat.
It was not until a counselling session with Smith in September 2023 that Gray admitted the relationship was ‘sexual in nature’ and continued after her suspension.
Police were called and the boy told FBI investigators that the pair had sex between five and 10 times during the fall of 2020.
He said Gray performed oral sex on him but the pair did not have intercourse ‘in order for [him] to stay pure’.
However, the church downplayed the situation to its members even as police were interrogating its leadership about Gray’s conduct.
Smith wrote a letter on September 7, 2023, claiming police told him that the ‘reported level of physical contact did not rise to the level of criminal assault or abuse’.
His letter prompted the church’s discipleship content director, Courtney Reissig, to resign in disgust, citing ‘lack of transparency, accountability, and handling’ of an ‘abuse situation’.
The boy’s parents lashed out at the church in their statement on Monday, condemning the lack of support they said it showed their son.
‘Some of those people were in the courtroom today. Given the opportunity to stand in court with the victim, those charged with teaching, leading and protecting our son once again chose to sit idly by,’ they said.
‘Their continued silence speaks volumes. Their actions – or lack of them – continue to make a hard road even harder.
‘And the burden of that failure is a weight our son will carry for the rest of his life.
‘Our son, at great personal cost, chose a difficult and uncomfortable path by bravely speaking up when others wouldn’t. We hope his courage has made it harder for the defendant to ever harm another child.’
Smith resigned as pastor of the 128-year-old church, which routinely attracts nearly 1,000 people to its services, just before Gray was charged.
He was named as one of the defendants in the lawsuit, claiming he had ‘reasonable cause to suspect’ the abuse but failed to report it to police.