Victim's Mother: 'I Was Told Photos Were Not Important'

SOUTH LOS ANGELES, Calif. (KTLA) -- An attorney representing a student at Miramonte Elementary School said Friday that accused teacher Mark Berndt recruited children from after-school programs and other teachers' classes to take part in so-called "tasting games."

In these games, children were photographed while blindfolded, with cockroaches on their faces and asked to taste a liquid that police now believe was Berndt's semen.

Attorney Brian E. Claypool said his client, was 9-years-old when her photograph was taken multiple times by Berndt, although she was not his student.

"The potential pool of victims is beyond the classroom," Claypool said in a news conference outside the South L.A. campus.


District officials confirmed that not all of Berndt's alleged victims have been identified and some, like Claypool's client, weren't even his students.

Claypool's young client's mother, "Maria," says about seven months ago, she was summoned to a sheriff's substation to look at Berndt's now-infamous photo collection.

"When I arrived at the sheriff station they had an album full of children and I found several pictures of my daughter from different days because she was wearing different clothes in each picture," Maria told KTLA in an exclusive interview.

But before meeting with sheriff's investigators, Maria called Miramonte Elementary to tell staffers she'd be taking her daughter out of school early. She also told them why.

"The staff member at the after-school program told me that it was not important for me to go look at the photographs and that I shouldn't go," Maria said. "My daughter was just given cookies and that it was not important for me to go look at the photographs."

When she met with investigators, they weren't forthcoming about what she saw in those strange photos of her daughter blindfolded and eating cookies covered in a "white substance," she said.

Maria wanted the pictures and she wanted to confront Berndt but detectives told her to "keep quiet" and she could not take the photographs with her as they were still in the process of investigating Berndt. Instead, Maria confronted the supervisor of that after-school program the next day.

"(The supervisor told me,) 'If you have a problem with this then take your kids out of the after school program, because this is a teacher that we've known and he's been teaching here for close to thirty years and there's not a problem with us releasing students into his care.' "

And releasing students into Berndt's care was a common practice for staffers of the after-school program, Maria alleges.

"He would send a note to the supervisor or to the staff member that was working at the after school program, and tell them how many girls and which girls he wanted to be sent to his room," she said.

And Claypool believes the actions of the after-school staffers hint at an ugly truth: that other school staff members aided in the alleged horror that went on in Berndt's classroom.

"This is a systemic institutional failure," he said. "I think this is a flat out cover-up at the school. They need to clean house -- top to bottom."

When Maria spoke to her daughter about Berndt and those strange photographs, the young girl initially denied it all. But she eventually told her mother that Berndt had taken the photos having convinced her it was all a game.

"He would blindfold her lovely little daughter and you know what he would tell her? 'Hey, you're Mexican. Just pretend you're doing a piñata, don't ya'll do those piñatas? Just pretend you're doing that. It's a game.' " Claypool said. ."That is clearly taking an advantage of this family and predatorily."

Berndt, a 30-year veteran teacher, was investigated more than once in the past for inappropriate behavior.