Educator arrested in sex case

A Watts middle school administrator, who had been removed from a previous school for allegedly brandishing a pistol at a parent, was arrested Tuesday on suspicion of kidnapping and sexually assaulting a 13-year-old, police said.

Steven Thomas Rooney, the assistant principal at Markham Middle School, was taken into custody by Los Angeles police after the girl, a Markham student, told police she was forced into his car outside a fast-food restaurant, taken to his downtown residence and attacked.

Rooney is being held at the Parker Center jail downtown in lieu of $1-million bail and is expected to be arraigned Thursday on offenses that LAPD Capt. Fabian E. Lizarraga termed “very serious and egregious.”

The 39-year-old administrator was hired in 2000 as a teacher at the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Peary Middle School in Gardena. He also taught at Foshay Learning Center and then became an assistant principal at Fremont High School, both in South Los Angeles, before joining the staff at Markham in September.

Rooney, who was on voluntary leave from Markham when the alleged incident occurred, was arrested in February 2007 on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon but never prosecuted, Lizarraga said.

The Times reported at the time that police investigated Rooney for allegedly attacking the stepfather of a student during an altercation. Neither school district officials nor police would provide the name of the alleged victim or the man’s stepdaughter.

The stepfather filed a complaint, which led to the police inquiry and to Rooney’s temporary transfer to “a non-school setting.” When no charges were filed, district officials apparently cleared him to return to a campus.

Rooney, though new to Markham, was a visible, generally well-liked presence, students and active parents said Tuesday.

“Everybody liked him. I was like really close to him,” said Karla Espinoza, a 14-year-old eighth-grader. When she heard about the arrest, “I just started crying.”

She recalled one occasion that bothered her briefly. Rooney, she said, had once asked a friend of hers whether she would marry him if she were 18.

“I said, ‘Why would you ask a question like that?’ And he said, ‘Never mind. Forget it.’ ”

Karla’s mother, a parent volunteer, said she was in shock. “He would listen to the parents,” said Eloisa Espinoza. “He would listen to everybody.”

Staff members at Markham -- which is near four low-income housing projects and amid the territory of seven violent street gangs -- have worked to change the school’s reputation for low academic achievement and unsafe conditions.

The efforts have included a partnership with the city attorney’s office. Progress has been slow but discernible, participants said.

Rooney, whose duties included seventh-grade discipline and facilities issues, was part of the turnaround team, responsible for gathering data about student confrontations.

Another member of the turnaround team worried about the fallout from Rooney’s arrest.

“Sometimes it’s like putting your finger in the dike and seeing a leak spring elsewhere, but you don’t expect this from a member of your own team,” said the administrator, who asked not to be named because she wasn’t authorized to speak to the media.

School staff tried to contact parents en masse with an automated message and sent home with students a bulletin about the arrest. When some parents got word, they descended on the school to remove their children for the remainder of the day.

Senior district administrators had required Markham to hire Rooney to fill a staff vacancy, several district sources said.

“Must place” administrators have sometimes been ineffective or disliked at other schools, but not always, said Michael O’Sullivan, president of Associated Administrators of Los Angeles, the administrators union. Staff at schools with declining enrollment, for example, frequently must be placed elsewhere.

Lizarraga said the victim, who enrolled at Markham in December, attended Saturday English classes on the campus at East 104th Street.

The girl, who does not speak English, was near a restaurant in the neighborhood when Rooney approached her and “forced her into the car,” Lizarraga said, adding that he knew of no relationship between the two.

Faye Banton, an L.A. Unified director of school services said that on Monday the parents of the alleged victim went to the principal’s office to ask where their daughter had been Saturday.

The principal, Verna Stroud, said she did not know, but the girl later told what happened, and school officials immediately called police.

Rooney was arrested outside his downtown residence.

andrew.blankstein @latimes.com

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Times staff writer Richard Winton contributed to this report.