Cody Lee Taylor, 36, turned himself in on Thursday morning, according to a press release after he was the subject of an arrest warrant for possession of child pornography.
Taylor is a former Lubbock-Cooper ISD elementary school teacher.
An arrest warrant said a female student made an outcry to teachers at Lubbock Cooper North Elementary School on February 21. A second girl came forward after the first.
“The girls were crying and visibly shaking,” the arrest warrant said. “[The girls] reported that the Defendant was taking pictures of them with a camera under a table, and that they were scared of him.”
The school principal confronted Taylor and asked for his phone. The warrant said he refused to give it up. Officials later obtained a search warrant for Taylor’s phone and his home.
A deleted video was recovered. The warrant said it seemed to show the crotch of a student in a classroom.
In addition, a forensic review of Taylor’s phone showed “manual searches” of the Internet with “multiple key terms related to child pornography,” the warrant said.
The warrant said Taylor admitted to looking for child pornography when he was younger – age 25 – but not now.
“When the Defendant was questioned as to why he would hold his phone underneath a desk and point the camera lens on the phone directly at a juvenile female’s crotch area, he stated it was just an accident,” the warrant said.
Investigators believed his answers were not reasonable.
As of Thursday afternoon, bond was not listed on Taylor’s jail booking sheet.
On Thursday, Lubbock-Cooper ISD issued a statement:
Student safety and well-being is the utmost priority of Lubbock-Cooper ISD. As soon as campus administrators were made aware of potentially inappropriate behavior exhibited by this employee, the employee was removed from the classroom and was not permitted any further contact with Lubbock-Cooper ISD students. The district immediately contacted law enforcement officials and cooperated fully in the investigative process, which began the same day. This employee resigned on Friday, February 22, during the investigation.
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