CROWN HEIGHTS, NY (PIX11)—
After seeing that her child's former teacher's aide had been arrested for a variety of sex crimes against children, a mother sat her son down on Tuesday. "He was shy, he was holding his head down," Zacaryta Brown told PIX11 News, "And I was kinda like, 'You can tell me if somebody threatened you." The reaction she got from her son, whose last name is different from hers and whose identity PIX11 News is concealing, stunned her."He said he was hit in the private, and then slapped in the butt when he rejected him from helping him with his classwork," Brown said about an incident two years ago involving her son and Taleek Brooks, 40, the teacher's aide and basketball coach. Brooks is in federal lockup awaiting trial on a variety of child porn charges, including recording video of himself touching the genitals of a boy as young as ten and of Brooks spanking a naked child. Both videos, prosecutors say, were recorded in a classroom at Brooks's school, P.S. 243.
FBI agents re-arrested Brooks Monday evening. He had been arrested last month on charges of possessing and sharing child porn after he had been in contact online with what he thought was a fellow child porn file share partner. That partner turned out to be an FBI agent looking for child sex predators.
He was released on bail in January, but as agents continued to pore through more than 1,000 child porn files they had confiscated from Brooks, they said they found at least two files that featured him engaged in child sex acts.
Zacaryta Brown's son was not one of the children in the two videos that investigators say were shot by Brooks in classrooms, but what the eight year-old told his mother shines an intense light onto the possibility that the man whom agents say confessed to child porn charges may have carried out a variety of sex crimes against children in his care over his 20-year Department of Education career.
"[My son] told me it happened often and [that Brooks] said if he told his mother he's gonna punch him in his face," Zacaryta Brown said. She said she had withdrawn her son and his 10 year-old brother from P.S. 243 earlier this year, but had returned to the school Wednesday seeking help following her son's allegations against Brooks.
"He didn't tell us to tell Mommy," the boy told PIX11 News. "That's why we didn't tell her." His mother, Zacaryta Brown, said that school officials instructed her to contact federal investigators and gave her a phone number to call.
Meanwhile, Brooks's arrest raises even more questions about the man who had passed a background check when he first joined the DOE in 1991, and had passed subsequent checks through The Boys and Girls' Club, where he worked after school. Investigators say he not only recorded himself sexually abusing students, they say he also shared child porn with others. That leads some people in the community where Brooks worked and lived wondering if there may be other people in the community carrying out child sex crimes.
"Let's make sure the feds know," community activist Tony Herbert told PIX11 News. "Let's talk about it, let's get the information out and let's get the help these children need."
Zacaryta Brown echoed Herbert's message. She said that her other son, who had also attended P.S. 243, said that a different teacher had treated him similarly to the way his brother says he was treated by Brooks.
"I'm still gonna ask more," she said. "Once you start talking with [your] kids, you never know what else will come up."
