School guard didn’t molest, jury decides

2 teens accused now-fired LR worker

A former Horace Mann Middle School security guard, fired after two students accused him of molesting them in the school, was cleared of the accusations Wednesday after a two-day trial.

The seven men and five women of the jury deliberated just under two hours before delivering their acquittal for 41-year-old Robert Lee Myles Jr. to Pulaski County Circuit Judge Leon Johnson.

Myles had been charged with three counts of second-degree sexual assault that could have sent him to prison for 60 years.

Myles, a Little Rock father of two, did not testify, but jurors heard his side of the events in a recorded interview with Little Rock School District investigators. Also, four defense witnesses described for jurors his good works helping troubled children.

In closing arguments, defense attorney Darrell Brown told jurors that the accusers — who were 14-year-old eighth-graders when they told police Myles had groped them around Thanksgiving 2012 — were troubled teens who had lied about his client, a man who had dedicated much of his life to mentoring children in difficult circumstances.

“It comes down to credibility. Who do you believe?” he said, suggesting a lawsuit against Myles and the school district might be a motive for the teens to make up the accusations. “These young teens came here to lie.”

Myles’ enthusiasm for helping might have led him to violate a school policy with one of the teens that prohibited him from being alone with students, Brown told jurors. But the teens could not clearly describe to the jury what they claimed had been done to them, while some of the actions they attributed to Brown weren’t physically possible, the lawyer said.

“He put himself in a situation he shouldn’t have,” Brown said. “How could Mr. Myles have gotten into a position to do what they say he did?”

The only thing Myles did to the teens that they did not like was to call them out for their bad behavior and poor academic performance and try to push them toward being better students and people, Brown said. The two resented his intrusion into their lives and lied during their Tuesday testimony to get him into trouble, the attorney said.

“He’s talking to [one teen] about things his mother even says he doesn’t want to hear about,” the attorney said. “He was telling them what they were doing was wrong … and they didn’t like it.”

Deputy prosecutor Jeanna Sherrill told jurors, “To believe the teens are lying is to believe the first teen to come forward orchestrated a setup so vast and complex that he duped teachers and administrators, arranged for school surveillance video to show him and Myles together and play-acted at being upset and disturbed.”

Then the student gets to come to court, endure being called a liar and submit himself to scrutiny of strange adults while describing how a grown man felt up his penis, she said.

“He’s got to get all of these people to lie, this 14-year-old teen,” she said in closing arguments. “What’s he got to gain besides embarrassment? What does that teen have to gain?”

Deputy prosecutor Robbie Jones said the defendant was careful to try and disguise his repeated groping of the teens as “play wrestling” and made sure they were out of camera view when he fondled them.

He acknowledged the accusers had difficult lives and some difficult behavior, but he said that makes them susceptible to being preyed on by men such as Myles.

“What does a predator do? A predator waits. A predator stalks. A predator prepares,” he told jurors. “A predator attacks at the moment the prey is most vulnerable.”