Thursday, January 23, 2025

Former Carl Junction choir teacher pleads not guilty, next hearing scheduled


Former Carl Junction R-1 choir teacher Craig Smith pleaded not guilty to stalking and child pornography charges during a video arraignment Wednesday in Jasper County Circuit Court.

Smith told Judge Nicole Marie Carlton that he intends to hire a private attorney and would not be using a public defender.

Smith is being held in the Jasper County Detention Center on a $400,000 cash-only bond.

His next hearing is scheduled for 8:30 a.m. February 5.







Previous posts




The Turner Report: CJ Superintendent says he knew nothing about stalking, stood up to parents who backed Craig Smith.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

A guy I work with brought me a newspaper from CJ today and I read the story about the situation at first break and now I feel upset enough to post after reading the story.
I have a daughter. She is in grade school. We do not live in CJ nor attend schools in CJ. If anything were to happen to her there are not enough men in the four state area to stop me from getting to the person responsible.
My anger with the CJ school board is that they allowed this child predator to retire which meant he was able to keep his certification and could have been hired by another district and continued his stalking and possibly target other kids. They chose to allow him to retire. They did not terminate. I believe they are to be held accountable.
Further reading of the same story quoted the superintendent saying it didn’t matter whether he retired or was terminated, he’s gone which is what everyone wanted. That comment makes me so angry. So irresponsible is this person in charge of the district that he doesn’t care if this child predator went elsewhere and continued his actions. He needs to be held accountable for his lack of decision making.
Then I was told today at work the superintendent is also the baseball coach and the pedophile has a son on the baseball team who is a starting pitcher and the superintendent was doing everything he could to protect the offender so his son could help the team this spring. Unbelievable. My rage and anger grows and I don’t even have anything to do with CJ, but the fact remains it could have impacted my daughter and family. Completely unacceptable.

Anonymous said...

Yes, Pass the Buck and let the Next School District deal with him. Also, if they had Fired him his Teacher's Union would have probably sued the School District for his rights to teach. You see there is No Accountability - Across the Board.

Anonymous said...

Maybe the blame for not firing him belongs to the Teacher Union. They probably have so many rules in place that you can't fire a teacher for cause without a hearing and all the suspensions/warnings/etc that have to happen first.