from www.pittsburghlive.com – A Sewickley mom who gave alcohol to her teenage son’s friends and then made sexual advances toward them will spend 18 months on probation, a judge ruled Wednesday.
Cassandra Sproch, 43, pleaded guilty to 14 misdemeanors including child endangerment, corruption of minors and furnishing alcohol to minors. Prosecutors withdrew a felony charge of unlawful contact with a minor.
Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge David R. Cashman sentenced Sproch, a former part-time dance and theater teacher at Propel Homestead K-8 campus.
Sproch’s attorney, Patrick Thomassey, said what she did was wrong but blamed it on a “combination of loneliness and two bottles of wine.”
“Had I been one of those guys, it would never have gone this far, because I would have kept my mouth shut and said ‘Wow’ to my buddies,” Thomassey told the judge.
“There’s a big difference between boys and girls. To boys, what happened is a rite of passage. It doesn’t have the effect on young men as it has on young women. Guys deal with stuff.”
Deputy District Attorney Laura Ditka disagreed and said the teenagers were impressionable children.
“I’m always taken by the fact when it’s a woman offender on a boy, it’s an ‘Atta boy,’ but when it’s a man offender on a girl, it’s the horror of horrors. I don’t see a difference.”
Sproch’s then-14-year-old son told county police detectives he was at his mother’s Beaver Road home Nov. 15, 2009, when she arrived with three students, ages 13, 15 and 16, according to a police affidavit.
Sproch eventually began making dinner, poured each child a glass of wine and “encouraged them to drink,” the affidavit stated.
The boys told police Sproch got drunk and began “acting crazy.” When the teens went into another room to play video games, she called the 15-year-old boy upstairs, touched him and offered to have sex with him, police said.
The boy refused and went back downstairs. After “continued requests” by Sproch, the 16-year-old boy went upstairs. The other two boys followed and found Sproch and the boy in her bedroom, where Sproch was kissing him and had him “pinned against the bedroom wall,” police reported.
Sproch’s son and the other boy dragged the 16-year-old from the room and the teens left the home, the affidavit stated.