Teacher Denies Intimate Relationship With Boy

LAS VEGAS —  Tanya Joan Hadden says it all went bad, really, at Buffalo Bill’s on the California-Nevada border.

It was outside the sprawling resort and casino that the San Bernardino high school teacher recalled turning to her 15-year-old pupil--some say, her lover--and asking: “Do we turn around? What do we do here?”

The boy insisted that they go on, Hadden said. And so they did. To Las Vegas, where the 33-year-old teacher acknowledges she spent three days of adventure and anxiety with a boy who had once been just another student.

The flaxen-haired teacher told her story Friday afternoon from behind a smudged plexiglass divider at the Clark County Detention Center, where she faces charges of kidnapping and “statutory sexual seduction,” which could land her in prison for years.

Soft-spoken and fatigued, her blue nail polish peeling, Hadden admitted a lot to a reporter: She had shown poor judgment and a failure of “impulse control.” Her feelings for a teenage boy had gotten the best of her. And, yes, she loves Richard Pena, the bright sophomore who first walked into her class last fall.

What she would not admit, what she scoffed at, was what police, prosecutors and television news reports were all saying--that she and Pena were lovers and that she had broken the law by having sex with the 5-foot-6, 145-pound boy.

“That’s so not what this is,” Hadden said, exasperated.

Instead, the popular science teacher said, she and the boy had grown over many months into friends, even soul mates--who shared a love of punk rock and deep conversation. It was a sojourn that carried them through phone calls and private meetings back home and finally, this week, through a three-day odyssey in the desert.

“I just think [it was] too much thinking with my heart,” she said, “and not my head.”

Still without a lawyer Friday because charges had not been filed in Nevada, Hadden’s 5-foot-2, 100-pound frame was lost in a navy blue jail tunic and pants.

She said her relationship with Pena began like with any other pupil--for an hour in class each day.

He earned an A last semester in Integrated Science at Cajon High School, the same school she graduated from. The first-period class had moved on this semester from physics to chemistry.

At first, Hadden says, she would occasionally give Pena rides home in her Thunderbird, listening to him talk about his life. Sometime in the late winter, she began to talk about her own life and her disintegrating marriage.

They would meet at McDonald’s for lunch, one of his favorites, but she, a vegan, would just watch him eat.

“We’re very similar,” Hadden said. “He said I’m like a female version of him.... He has a dark sense of humor.”

Hadden said the boy rarely came to her home and they rarely talked on the phone. Once, when they spoke, she said, his mother confronted Richard about the conversation.

Sometime around March, they were in a store when she suggested she wanted Pena to call her by her first name. “He had called me Miss Hadden when we were in public,” she recalled. “And it sounded funky.”

Hadden, who has been a teacher for just two years, said she admired Pena because he wasn’t aggressive like many of the other boys. She noted how many girls were attracted by his sensitivity and muscular build.

The trip to Las Vegas was as inadvertent as the blossoming relationship, the teacher said.

Both she and Pena had been questioned Monday by authorities, who had gotten reports that the teacher was buying alcohol for minors. Hadden, who acknowledged she bought beer for a friend of Pena’s, was told she might be charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

“Richard kind of panicked,” Hadden said, fearful about what his parents might think. The boy reportedly called and asked his teacher to pick him up at Cal State San Bernardino.

Hadden said she only got on the freeway because she had switched cars with her husband and was clumsy with the clutch. Once on the freeway, she said, the two could drive and talk in peace. She just wanted to calm Pena’s jangled nerves.

They drove for hours. At some point in the California desert, they ran out of gas and had to wait for a tow truck with gas.

“We kept driving and driving and talking, and then he’d be quiet for a while,” Hadden said. “I told him, ‘Pretty soon we’re going to be in Nevada. We need to figure out what we’re doing here.’”

Pena wanted to go on to Las Vegas, where he had never been and to put off any confrontation with his parents, Hadden said. And she went along, even though she knew it was a mistake.

“I guess it was harder for me to make him upset,” she said, “than to worry about the consequences of my actions.”

She said the teen was giddy when they arrived Monday night in Las Vegas--rolling into the parking lot near the Luxor Hotel, its giant pyramid looming over the landscape.

They went on to the castle-like Excalibur, where they stayed for the night, Hadden said. But she that night, and the two that followed, she said, they slept in separate beds.

On Tuesday, they strolled through the Paris Hotel and on to the Aladdin, where they ate and dawdled in the food court for hours.

Hadden said she had wanted from the start for Pena to call his parents. By Tuesday, in the parking lot of an outlet mall, they had a huge fight. “I told him to get out of the car and call his mom.” He refused. “I said, ‘Then I’ll go call your mom.’ He said, ‘If you do, when you come back out, I won’t be here.’”

Hadden said they both cried. Pena did not call home. Tired and hungry, they went that night to eat at the Rio Casino Resort.

Afterward, Pena checked in with a friend and the two found a cheaper hotel off the Strip. “It was kind of seedy,” she said.

On Wednesday, they went to a Wal-Mart, where Pena playfully picked up an inflated plastic bat and pretended to stalk Hadden through the aisles. At one point, she lost sight of him and felt a flash of panic. She found him casually perusing merchandise in another aisle.

But Hadden said she knew this journey was coming to an end. They were wearing the same clothes for the third day in a row. They were running low on cash. She had tried to avoid using credit cards, knowing they could be traced.

They checked into the New Frontier Hotel & Gambling Hall Wednesday and finally agreed they would return to California the next day. Pena insisted he would stay with friends.

The next morning, they were preparing to go, Hadden said, when the phone rang. “I picked up the phone, and whoever it was didn’t say anything,” she recalled. “I said, ‘They’re here!’ ... I knew we’d get caught.”

Ten minutes later, a man was at their door demanding they open it. She did, and found several hotel security people, one with his gun drawn.

Hadden said she knew from the time she left San Bernardino with Pena that she would lose a lot. “I can’t teach anymore,” she said.

But she considered it “outrageous” when she learned of the nine counts police plan to level at her in Nevada. And that doesn’t count the allegations already filed in San Bernardino of child stealing and performing a lewd act on a child. Those counts could bring five years behind bars.

Back in California, San Bernardino Deputy Dist. Atty. Verna Carey was not buying suggestions that teacher and student were just friends or soul mates. Several students at Cajon High School have said they saw Hadden and Pena together, and “they were sexually touching and kissing each other,” Carey said.

Authorities cautioned against Hadden, or anyone else, making light of the situation. “She took this child and she concealed him from his parents,” Carey said.

Carey said previous cases have shown her that teenage boys are as vulnerable as girls in such circumstances.

Pena “is absolutely a victim here,” the prosecutor said. “And it’s been my experience that the boy victims suffer just as many consequences as the girls do.”

Late Thursday night, San Bernardino police officials escorted Herman Pena, the boy’s father, to the state line for a reunion. By Friday, the family had returned to its modest home.

Cars packed the driveway in front of the Pena home. A note posted on the front door for the stream of reporters anxious to talk to the Pena family read: “Please respect our privacy.”

Back in the Las Vegas jail, Hadden recalled last seeing Pena as he was led out of the Frontier Hotel by security guards.

“They took him outside the main door, and I could see them taking him away,” said Hadden, her voice breaking as she started to cry. “He looked back at me.”

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Staff writer Tina Dirmann contributed to this report.