Teacher Pleads No Contest to Lewd Acts

A former South Los Angeles-area elementary school teacher who took photos of blindfolded and gagged students with semen-tainted cookies or spoons held to their mouths pleaded no contest Friday morning to 23 counts of committing lewd acts on children.

Ex-Miramonte Elementary School teacher Mark Henry Berndt, 62, of Torrance, committed the abuse between 2005 and 2011. The charges involved 23 children who were 7 to 10 years old.

The 2012 arrests of Berndt and another former Miramonte teacher, Martin Springer, led to a community outcry and an overhaul of the management of the school. Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent John Deasy replaced the school's entire staff, although most eventually returned to work at the campus.

• Previously: Accused Teacher Held on $23M Bail

A series of lawsuits and claims were filed by alleged victims against the LAUSD, which so far has paid out nearly $30 million in settlements. Dozens more claims are pending.

Springer is still awaiting trial on three counts of committing lewd acts on a child.

Berndt was arrested in January 2012 following a roughly yearlong investigation. School district officials said Berndt was removed from the classroom when the allegations against him first arose in January 2011 and the district moved to fire him, but he resigned before he could be terminated.

Sheriff's officials said the investigation of Berndt began when a film processor turned over more than 40 photographs of children in a classroom, with their eyes blindfolded and mouths covered in tape, to the Redondo Beach Police Department. 

CBS Los Angeles reported that the film processor may have been a CVS One-Hour Photo lab in Redondo Beach.

Some of the pictures showed Berndt with his arm around the children or with his hand over their mouths, according to the Sheriff's Department.

A sheriff's sergeant said some of the photographs "depicted girls with what appeared to be a blue plastic spoon, filled with an unknown clear/white liquid substance, up to their mouths as if they were going to ingest the substance." Some photos also showed children with a large roach on their faces, sheriff's officials said.

Redondo Beach police Sgt. Shawn Freeman, who reviewed the initial police report in October 2010, told CBS Los Angeles that the photos were "very strange in nature."

"It's school-aged children in these photographs, and these children are wearing blindfolds or they're wearing duct tape," he told CBS Los Angeles. "In some of these photographs, the male suspect has his arms around these students, and he's smiling, and they're smiling, and it just didn't seem appropriate at all for being in a classroom."

According to a Los Angeles Times timeline of events in the case, the RBPD turned over the case to the Sheriff's Department after learning that the photos were taken at Miramonte Elementary School, which is in an unincorporated section of South Los Angeles.

Sheriff's officials noted that detectives found a blue plastic spoon and an empty container in the trash in Berndt's classroom. Both items tested positive for semen, and DNA testing matched it to Berndt, according to the Sheriff's Department.

—City News Service, with additional reporting by Nicole Mooradian.