Ex-Conestoga aide pleads guilty to sex with student
Man apologizes to wife, family, and God — but not to the victim
The Conestoga High School instructional aide who sexually assaulted a student at the school over a period of months offered an apology during the hearing Tuesday on his guilty plea and sentencing to charges in the case.
Addressing his regrets to “everyone involved,” Arthur Phillips named his wife, his daughter, his son-in-law, and friends as people who had forgiven him. “I love my daughter and my wife, and my God,” Phillips said when given the chance to speak on his own behalf in the proceeding before Common Pleas Court Judge Patrick Carmody. “Thank you God, for forgiving me.”
Prominently missing from his apology, however, was the teenage girl he had lured into a sexual relationship with text messages, visits, trips out, and explicit photographs. The omission was not lost on Carmody.
“That’s pretty presumptuous of you, don’t you think?” asked the judge, offering an apology to everyone but the victim. The girl and her family remain heartbroken and traumatized by the experience Phillips put the teenager through, he said, emotions that were expressed in a letter from her mother that Carmody read to himself but kept confidential.
“I feel for your family,” Carmody allowed. “But what baffles me is that when I have someone in front of me who has a daughter of their own, (I wonder) how could you do this to someone else’s daughter? It’s mind-boggling. It’s disturbing.”
The judge told Phillips, dressed in a plaid shirt and a black jacket and speaking in a nervous whisper, that the only reason that he was accepting the proposed plea agreement and sentence offered by the prosecution and defense was that its specifics amounted to a near life term for the 67-yearold. If not for Phillips’ age, he would reject the agreement as too lenient, he said.
“You may never leave jail, you understand that?” Carmody asked. “You’re going to be sitting in jail for at least the next 10 years.”
The former aide eventually noted that he meant to include the girl in his apology, but did not mention her by name.
Phillips, 67, of Tredyffrin, pleaded guilty to charges of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, aggravated indecent assault, institutional sexual assault, and corruption of minors. As part of the agreement negotiated by Assistant District Attorney Emily Provencher, of the DA’s Child Abuse Unit, and defense attorney Robert J. Donatoni of West Chester, he agreed to a sentence of 10-to-20 years in state prison.
Phillips, a grandparent who worked in the Conestoga television studio as an aide since 2006, will also be required to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life.
In discussing Phillips’ decision to plead guilty rather than go to trial on the charges, Donatoni asked him if he understood what he was doing. The attorney added, however, that Phillips had never intended to do anything but plead guilty to the charges.
In reciting what Phillips had done to the girl in the months since January 2017 until his arrest in April of this year, Provencher said the grooming he engaged in had begun at the start of the Conestoga school year when the girl, whose name was not mentioned in the proceeding, was 15.
Provencher said the investigation began April 18, when Tredyffrin police got a report from officials that a student was involved in a relationship with Phillips. They submitted emails and text messages that were sent between Phillips and the student since January.
Investigators said that Phillips and the victim talked about “sexual issues” via text messages. At least once, police said, he sent her a picture of his genitals.
The Chester County Detectives’ Computer Forensic Unit examined the phones used by Phillips and the alleged victim, which investigators said showed several hundred messages communicated between the two that involved a “sexual nature.”
Interviewed on multiple occasions by county Detective Joseph Walton, the girl said that Phillips befriended her, and he drove her to places in his car, including the King of Prussia Mall in Montgomery County. The report states that the alleged victim told police she was sexually assaulted on more than 10 occasions in various areas in Tredyffrin, despite saying no to Phillips. Investigators alleged that Phillips made the student have sex with him.
The teenager told police that Phillips allegedly groped her, touched her and kissed her while they were in Phillips’ school office in the high school. She told police she tried to avoid his advances.
Investigators said that when the relationship became known, Phillips reportedly crashed his car. Police found a written note in his car that read, “I was just a guy trying to help a kid and the boundaries just got gray.”
Carmody, reacting to that statement, asked whether Phillips was intending to commit suicide. “I just lost control,” he said. “It was on my mind.”
But the judge offered little sympathy for Phillips’ description of “gray” boundaries.
“That’s ridiculous,” he said. “There could not be any more of a clear boundary line not to cross.”
Phillips, 67, of Tredyffrin, pleaded guilty to charges of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, aggravated indecent assault, institutional sexual assault, and corruption of minors.