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Former Southern California educator gets 10 years for student sexual abuse
This photo released by the Riverside Police Dept. shows Andrea Michelle Cardosa, 40. Cardosa, a former Southern California educator, has been charged with three charges of committing lewd acts on a child and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
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A woman who admitted to molesting a former student on a phone call that was recorded and uploaded to YouTube was sentenced to 10 years in prison on Monday.
Andrea Cardosa, a former Riverside school administrator, pleaded guilty to three charges of committing lewd acts on a child, according to the Associated Press. Prosecutors dropped over a dozen other counts.
About a year ago, Jamie Carillo uploaded a video on YouTube — that later went viral — of a phone call with Cardosa she recorded. Cardosa used to be one of her teachers. In the call, Cardosa said she regretted molesting Carillo about a hundred times when she was in her early teens. That recording led to charges and a second victim coming forward, and Cardosa plea-bargained to avoid a potential life sentence.
When the allegations came up in Feb. 2014, there were questions regarding the statute of limitations and how the YouTube video would play as potential evidence. Cardosa's lawyer, Randy Collins, told KPCC in an email statement, that there are statute of limitations issues:
Given Ms. Carillo's very public claims of abuse it will be my obligation, as Ms. Cardosa's legal counsel, to see that justice prevails in the midst of the media wildfire. Fortunately, our justice system requires more than a YouTube video to determine the facts of a case. As we proceed, I am certain that evidence will shed new light on all charges filed by the D.A.'s office against my client.
"All you need is the permissive inference... you have the right phone number, you got someone with the person's similar voice that's enough to get it in [the case]," he said in regards to the Cardosa trial.
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