Former student testifies to having sex several times with North Texas school counselor
A young Dallas County man testified Thursday that when he was a student at Harwood Junior High he had sex several times with a school counselor and told her that he loved her at least once during their brief relationship.
The now 21-year-old man said he broke off the relationship when his mother caught them having sex at the family’s home in Euless.
“The look on my mother’s face,” the man told the Tarrant County jury Thursday morning, “I knew we had to stop.”
His testimony came on the second day of the trial for former Harwood Junior High School counselor Shannon Hathaway. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram is not identifying the man because the case involves sexual allegations.
The trial is in the 297th Criminal District Court in Fort Worth.
Hathaway, who was married and had twin baby girls at the time of the alleged relationship, has pleaded not guilty in the case. She is charged with multiple counts of improper relationship between an educator and a student.
Her defense attorneys called the allegations “lies,” noting prosecutors had no phone records, no text messages, no video, no social media and no DNA that showed Hathaway and the student were together
Hathaway is accused of having sex with the then ninth-grade student nearly a dozen times at her Keller home and his home in Euless.
His sister told authorities that during the 2016-17 school year, Hathaway would spend a lot of time with her then 17-year-old brother, according to a warrant obtained by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 2018.
The man’s sister made an outcry in May 2018, and Hathaway was arrested and charged a few weeks later after an investigation.
The young man testified Thursday morning before a Tarrant County jury of eight men and four women that he first had sex with Hathaway at her Keller home in 2016 when he, his sister and a friend of his sister spent a night at Hathaway’s home.
“I was incredibly nervous because I never had had sex before,” the man said. “My face was flush and I was shaking.”
But the man said Hathaway told him to relax and she performed a sex act on him before the two had intercourse.
“I couldn’t believe it had happened,” he said when prosecutor Bill Vassar asked how it felt for a 17-year-old to be having sex with an adult woman. “I was in shock.”
The young man also testified they had sex at his Euless home and made out at her office and other rooms at Harwood Junior High in Bedford, making sure they stayed away from school cameras and faculty members.
The school is in the Hurst-Euless-Bedford school district.
On Wednesday morning, Vassar told the jury in his opening statement that Hathaway picked the perfect victim, a struggling student who had repeated several grades in the HEB school district.
The young man testified Thursday that his problems included school, depression over the shooting death of his older brother in 2014 and lack of supervision at home as his parents worked long hours.
In the winter of 2016, the young man first met Hathaway at Harwood Junior High when she took him into her office and said that he needed to get his act together or he would fail the ninth grade.
“Everyone loved her,” the man testified. “She was generous and an attractive teacher.”
In time, the young man said, they exchanged emails and telephone numbers.
“We talked about my problems such as school, my brother and girls,” the man told the jury. “She was putting in a lot of effort in helping me.”
The young man also said it was about that time that he started to develop feelings for Hathaway. Hathaway also told him about her problems he said.
“She said she was not having sex with husband and he didn’t touch her anymore,” her former student testified. “We were in her car when we kissed the first time and then we planned to have sex at her house.”
This story was originally published September 23, 2021 at 12:56 PM.
