Ex-aide admits to sex with student

Christine Towers sentenced to 11½ to 23 months in Chester County Prison

WEST CHESTER » A former tutor and coach at Conestoga High School was taken into custody Monday after she pleaded guilty to charges stemming from her improper sexual relationship with one of her students, now a senior at the Main Line school.

Christine Towers, 26, of Phoenixville, began serving an 11½to 23-month sentence in Chester County Prison, a jail stay that was part of a plea agreement negotiated between the prosecution and her defense attorney and presented to a Common Pleas judge. She pleaded guilty to charges of institutional sexual assault and corruption of minors.

Towers, who agreed to surrender her teacher’s license and have no unsupervised contact with minors in the future, said little before being placed in handcuffs and led from Judge Patrick Carmody’s courtroom as members of her family and the victim’s family looked on.

“I want to deeply apologize for my actions,” said Towers, dressed in a gray sweater, black blouse and khaki pants, her blonde hair pulled back in a braid. “I take responsibility for this, and I assure you that this will never happen again.”

Towers must undergo an assessment by the state’s Sexual Offender’s Assessment Board and register with the state as part of the Megan’s Law requirements. She briefly glanced back at her family before she was taken from the courtroom by a deputy sheriff.

Carmody said she had done the right thing by pleading guilty and not making the prosecution go through the rigors of a trial, but bemoaned the fact that she had ruined her own life and career and, more importantly, sent the young man’s life spinning out of control.

“You’ve thrown so much away — a teaching career — and you’ll be doing jail time,” the judge said. “You made decisions that ended up in someone being traumatized. And that’s a shame.”

In a written statement that the victim, now a high school senior, read to the court, he recalled thinking that the relationship that Towers forged with him was improper, but that he did not know how to stop it. He said he felt sympathetic toward her as she told him about her own life’s difficulties, a process that he recognized ultimately was a form of manipulation.

He said that ever since news broke about Towers’ arrest last spring, he had faced taunts and teasing from his classmates at Conestoga, a school that has faced a number of student scandals over the past several months. His senior year, instead of being a heady time to remember, had “turned out to be a disaster.”

“All I want to do is forget all of this and go back to the life I had before I met Christine,” said the youth, whose name is being withheld by the Daily Local News because of the nature of the crime involved. He said, however, that he had learned an important lesson: “I’ve learned what love is and what love isn’t.”

According to Assistant District Attorney Emily Provencher of the DA’s Child Abuse Unit, who prosecuted the case, Towers was employed at Conestoga from August 2014 to April 2016 as a para-educator and athletic coach. She began tutoring the victim, who suffers from learning disabilities, when he was a sophomore on a one-on-one basis. In his junior year, she began increasing the amount of time they spent together and began taking him to eat, to the mall, and to Philadelphia. In March, she kissed him and went on to have unprotected sex with him on four occasions — at her parents’ home and at a local nature preserve.

Towers was arrested after the victim told a friend about what was happening and the allegations were reported to the county’s Child Abuse Hotline. The youth admitted the relationship to Chester County Detective Gerald Davis Jr., who was in court for the plea. Vincent DiFabio, the Paoli defense attorney who represented Towers, said she had cooperated with Davis from the beginning and had always taken responsibility for her offenses.

The victim’s mother, who read a prepared statement in court, said she had suspicions about the inappropriate nature of the relationship between her son and Towers, and confronted her. “I told her she needed to back away from him,” the woman said. “But it escalated.”

“I thought I was sending (her son) to a school where he would be safe,” said the woman, a single mother from Conestoga, who raised the victim and her older son by herself. “But this unspeakable thing happened. I feel like a failure as a mother. I hope and pray for some relief for my son.”

Carmody thanked the woman for her forthrightness, and told the victim that he should be proud of the way she stood up for him. “I think you showed courage today, and that is something to build on.”

Christine Towers