A federal grand jury on Wednesday indicted a St. Johns County private school teacher accused of trying to meet a teenager, who was actually an undercover agent, for sex.
Matthew Yates, 27, was indicted on two charges: attempted online enticement of a minor for sexual activity and attempting to entice a minor for sexual activity for the purpose of producing visual depictions of such conduct.
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The first charge was outlined in a criminal complaint. The second charge was not.
It did come out during a detention hearing last week that prosecutors say Yates wanted to produce child pornography from the act.
According to the 82-page criminal complaint, Yates is an eighth grade teacher at Veritas Classical School in St. Augustine, a classical Christian school that teaches kindergarten through 10th grade.
On June 30, 2021, according to the complaint, an agent working undercover was trying to identify adults trying to make contact with teens for illegal sexual activity using a social media app. According to the complaint, there was a user who posted, “Any women want to be rated by a teacher?” The agent posed as a 14-year-old girl and started messaging with the user, the complaint states.
The complaint shows, on Feb. 11, when the agent was working undercover again, a user in a social media app with the name “English teacher” posted, “Any women want to be rated by a teacher?” The agent, posing as a 14-year-old girl, started messaging with him and then they moved to messaging via the Kik app for nearly two weeks before switching to texting, according to the complaint.
The complaint includes pages and pages of transcripts of their messages, some of which were vulgar.
Recently, according to the complaint, Yates and the agent posing as a 14-year-old girl agreed to meet on Friday. When Yates went to the predetermined meeting location, agents spotted him in a Toyota 4Runner, arrested him and then took him to the FBI Jacksonville Field Office, the complaint states.
During his interview with the FBI, according to the complaint, he acknowledged that the various usernames were his and that he is employed at “Veritas.”
According to the complaint, he acknowledged that trying to meet a minor child for sex is illegal, and agents said he stated that he wanted “this,” which the agent “took to mean his arrest,” because he “wanted to be forced to be stopped.”
Yates said that he taught students from sixth through tenth grade and that he never fantasized about students, the complaint shows.
Yates already has a preliminary hearing scheduled for 3:30 p.m. Thursday.