A former Maryland substitute teacher and basketball coach who pleaded guilty Friday to state child pornography and child sex abuse charges victimized as many as 59 minors, according to prosecutors.
This week marked the first time authorities publicly disclosed the number of Speights’s victims and detailed how the Capitol Heights man secretly recorded boys on a game trip and posed as a teenage girl on social media to solicit and blackmail children for additional inappropriate images.
“Mr. Speights did what most predators do,” said Prince George’s County State’s Attorney Angela D. Alsobrooks, whose office brought the case with the Maryland attorney general. Through substitute teaching, coaching and volunteering, “he availed himself at every opportunity . . . to be around children,” she said.
Speights worked as a substitute teacher at Bradbury Heights Elementary School and John Eager Howard Elementary School, both in Prince George’s County, for 13 years. He coached sports at Bradbury Heights and for the South County Steelers through the South County Sports Academy in 2015 and 2016.
Assistant Attorney General Kelly A. Burrell said Speights found many of his victims through the school and through coaching, and took them to other locations, including his home.
“When Speights took these kids to different field trips and different events, while they were sleeping or in other compromised positions, he did photograph their genitalia and photographed them while they were showering,” Burrell said.
Burrell said she could not detail exactly how many students were Prince George’s County public schools students, and it remains unclear if any activity occurred on school property.
The 59 victims average between 10 and 12 years old, and not all of them have been identified, prosecutors said.
Speights, 35, pleaded guilty Friday in Prince George’s County Circuit Court to child sex abuse and three child pornography charges including distribution, possession and photographing. The plea in state court comes after Speights pleaded guilty Tuesday to one count of production of child pornography and one count of attempted production of child pornography in U.S. district court in Maryland.
Speights was arrested in 2017 after Maryland State Police received a tip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children about “sexually exploitative images” involving minors on his Dropbox account, according to state and federal prosecutors.
During a search of Speights’s home, authorities seized an iPad that included video he “surreptitiously” filmed while he and his basketball team were in North Carolina for a game in March 2016, his federal plea agreement states.
“Speights placed his backpack in the hotel room’s bathroom, with his iPad video recording from a hole in the exterior mesh pocket of the backpack,” according to the plea agreement. “Speights video recorded the exposed genitals of the two 11-year-old boys without their knowledge, and brought that video recording back from North Carolina to Maryland.”
In incidents dating to October 2015, Speights assumed the username and profile of “nikkytexasgurl” on a social messaging application, appearing to be a teenage girl contacting young boys, court documents also state. He then asked for and received inappropriate photos of an 11-year-old boy.
Under the assumed online identity, Speights “specifically threatened minor boys on more than one occasion that if they didn’t comply with his demands for creating and sending images of themselves engaged in sexually explicit conduct, he would tell ‘Coach Speights’ about the inappropriate online conversations,” his federal plea agreement said.
Speights requested images from more than 20 minors using the ruse and threat, federal prosecutors said.
He also faces prosecution in Worcester County tied to a trip he took with a basketball team to Ocean City.
Speights’s public defenders in federal court and Worcester County did not respond to requests for comment. His public defender in Prince George’s County declined to comment.
Prosecutors allege Speights created explicit images of himself with three minor boys in 2015, according to federal court documents: once during the basketball trip in Ocean City, another time at his Capitol Heights home and another time while chaperoning fifth-grade students on the Bradbury Heights field trip. In the case of the overnight school-sanctioned trip to William S. Schmidt Outdoor Education Center, Speights took images of himself fondling two children, prosecutors said.
John White, a spokesman for Prince George’s schools, said Thursday that “we stand ready to cooperate as needed, but we have received no further information from law enforcement and no confirmation of whether any PGCPS students were involved.”
White said he could not answer questions regarding the school-sanctioned trip or additional possible allegations involving Bradbury Heights because of the “legal nature” of the case.
The school system and South County Sports Academy officials have said they conducted background checks on Speights before he was approved for employment and coaching.
The disclosure of Speights’s case closely followed a major child sex abuse scandal in Prince George’s County involving Deonte Carraway, a former teacher’s aide and volunteer at Judge Sylvania W. Woods Elementary in Glenarden. Carraway leveraged his position as a teacher’s aide and community choir director to film students performing sex acts at school and at his home.
Carraway was sentenced to 75 years in federal prison and 100 years in state prison for dozens of sex abuse charges involving 23 students.
Several civil lawsuits and a class-action lawsuit against Carraway and the school system are pending in Prince George’s County Circuit Court.
Speights is expected to be sentenced in federal court and Prince George’s in July.
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