A middle school teacher was taken into custody by Irvine police on Sunday night for allegedly arranging a meeting with a kid and sending pornographic texts.
Eric Reid Zuercher, 44, was placed on administrative leave by the Irvine Unified School District after he was arrested by the Orange County Jail for trying to arrange a sexual encounter with a juvenile.
After a private group contacted the department and pretended to be a 14-year-old child online, investigators detained Zuercher at his Irvine home. When the correspondence become sexually explicit and the man sought to see the kid, they notified the authorities that they had been corresponding with him.
Before phoning the police, the gang briefly approached Zuercher at his house. Detectives acquired a warrant and detained the 44-year-old middle school teacher at his residence after forwarding the text exchanges to the police.
According to investigators, Zuercher was a teacher at Irvine’s Sierra Vista Middle School. Police and the district don’t think Zuercher interacted inappropriately with IUSD pupils.
A California Department of Education dashboard indicates that Sierra Vista Middle School has 1,188 pupils. Serving students in the seventh and eighth grades, it is the district’s largest middle school.
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