melissa weber

melissa weber
A teacher at a Queens middle school was charged with statutory rape of a 14-year-old student on Thursday after his mother searched his cellphone and found logs of hundreds of text messages and calls with the woman, prosecutors said.
The teacher, Melissa Weber, 27, was being held pending arraignment on multiple counts of rape and sexual abuse and on one count of endangering the welfare of a child, the Queens district attorney, Richard A. Brown, said in a news release. If convicted, she faces up to seven years in prison.
Prosecutors said the assignations took place after school hours on seven occasions since mid-April in a second-floor classroom at Junior High School 8 in Jamaica. Ms. Weber is accused of telling the boy: “Don’t tell anyone. I could get arrested and I could lose my teaching license.”
The case unfolded quickly, thanks to a diligent sleuth of a mother and a common evidence trail of the wireless age, prosecutors said.
The mother, a member of the Parent-Teacher Association at Junior High School 8, heard suspicions among people at the school that Ms. Weber was engaging in an inappropriate relationship with her son.
She then obtained the teacher’s telephone number and searched for it on her son’s phone on Wednesday.
In one of the most recent text messages, prosecutors said, the teacher gave the boy the assignment “Erase your phone.”
On Thursday morning, the mother brought her son to the local police station house.
“The charges are very disturbing,” Mr. Brown said. “A classroom should always be a safe place for a child.”
Ron Davis, a spokesman for the teachers’ union, the United Federation of Teachers, said it was required to provide legal representation for teachers. He said he was not yet familiar with the charges, which were announced late in the day.
Ms. Weber, who lives in West Babylon, on Long Island, could not be reached for comment.
The boy had taken a class with Ms. Weber, who taught social studies, according to a spokesman for Mr. Brown.