American paedophile and homosexual school band director of North Texas sentenced for sexual abuse of 13 boys 

Jedidiah Maus pleaded guilty to multiple indecency charges involving students. He was arrested in 2021.

By Edward Era Barbacena 

The families of the victims of a Keller middle school band director were in tears Tuesday as they addressed the man who sexually abused at least 13 boys, including two 17-year-olds and 11 younger students, after a judge sentenced him to 15 years in prison.

They told the judge how the boys Jedidiah Maus abused over the course of at least 10 years no longer feel like they can use public restrooms, have struggled academically, don’t like being alone with teachers and in some cases can’t be alone in the same room with a man to whom they aren’t related. One man, who as a teenager was abused repeatedly by Maus, said the abuse has impacted his ability to have healthy romantic relationships.

Tarrant County Criminal District Judge Wayne Salvant heard hours of testimony including from the defendant’s victims and their families at Tuesday’s sentencing hearing.

Maus pleaded guilty to seven counts of indecency with a child by exposure, one count of indecency with a child by sexual contact and one count of indecent exposure. In total, he was sentenced to 25 years and 180 days, but because the sentences will be served concurrently he will only spend 15 years behind bars.

Families of the victims described how Maus preyed on boys as young as 10 years old, in some cases following them into bathrooms at school and in other cases telling them to go to the bathroom with him. In at least one instance, the prosecution said, Maus walked into a band practice room at school to masturbate in front of a child. They also said he assaulted a teenage girl, the sister of one of the boys he sexually abused, by putting his hand around her throat.

The victims described how Maus would start off by looking at them at the urinal and having them look at him, then escalate things to masturbating with each other in the restroom and in some cases touching the genitals of the boys and making them touch his.

The prosecution asked for the maximum sentence which, if served concurrently, would have resulted in 20 years in prison. The defense asked for leniency, insisting that Maus should be rehabilitated instead of punished, requesting little to no time in prison.

The father of one victim, the first boy to come forward and speak out about abuse, told Maus that a prison sentence was a “gift.”

“Prison is probably the safest place for you,” the father said.

Survivors describe the abuse

Because he pleaded guilty, Tuesday was the first time the court heard from Maus’ victims and their families.

The Star-Telegram is not identifying the victims of the sexual abuse.

Salvant first heard testimony from a boy who described how when he was in Maus’ band class he was not only followed into the bathroom by Maus but led there on some occasions. He described how there were times Maus would invite him to leave class for a snack.

“We almost always ended up in the bathroom,” the boy said.

He and most of the other victims said they didn’t even realize at first that they were being sexually abused. One parent told the court that her son told her how Maus masturbated in front of him, but had trouble finding a way to describe it because he didn’t yet know what masturbation was.

One man, now in his 20s, said the abuse continued even into high school. One day, while Maus was with his middle school students at the man’s high school for a concert, he led the man, at the time a sophomore, into the bathroom.

Another boy said the abuse happened the entire time he was on campus for his eighth-grade year. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the boy said, the first nine weeks of school were remote. But when he returned to campus, Maus began exposing himself in the bathroom with the student.

After a little while, the abuse became consistent at about three times a week.

“Before this, he was my favorite teacher,” the boy said. “This is an evil thing. People who prey on young children should be locked away. … He built trust with his students so he could abuse them.”

Both the boys and the man who testified about the abuse they survived said they are still processing what happened. It stole their innocence and left them feeling powerless.

Two said they came forward — one to an administrator and the other to peers — but weren’t believed. The other said he wanted to come forward but couldn’t find the strength and didn’t think anybody would believe him. All said they know the abuse isn’t their fault but still blame themselves for the abuse of other boys who came after them.

The prosecution emphasized that in therapy Maus was determined to have above-average intelligence and suggested that he used that to determine the safest way to manipulate and initiate his abuse with each survivor.

Parents said they couldn’t understand or forgive the abuse.

Two fathers who took the stand talked about the impacts on their families. Both said that their faith has helped them get through it, but that nothing has been able to stop the hurt, anger, devastation and sense of betrayal.

“As a dad it made me feel like a failure, then the rage sets in, logic sets and you think about what you could lose if you take matters into your own hands,” one father said. “My son hid my gun because he was worried I would kill him.”

The father said he would have killed Maus if he’d caught him in the act, but said he explained to his children that he couldn’t do that after the fact because it could result in the father facing charges and being taken away from his children.

Both fathers said they wanted to kill Maus but theyrealized that wasn’t a real option.

“Your first emotion is righteous anger, but you have to let go of that anger to care for your son,” the other father said.

That father emphasized that the known instances of abuse span nearly a decade and that the actual number of boys Maus has harmed is unknown.

One mother who spoke said her 11-year-old son didn’t know he was a victim, even as he described the abuse.

“We literally went from putting money under his pillow from the tooth fairy to hearing about a teacher (masturbating) in front of him in the bathroom,” the mother said.

Her son and others won’t be alone with teachers anymore because of the trauma of what happened. They won’t go to tutoring and some have been failing state testing as a result.

The mother said her son, like all the other boys who spoke or had parents testify, either won’t use public restrooms or feel at danger when they do. He won’t go to see the nurse at school because the nurse is male. Instead, she and her husband have received texts from him when he is feeling unwell at school.

The survivors and their parents all asked the judge to sentence Maus to the maximum.

Investigation

After the first boy reported abuse to a parent, Detective Bethany Todd with the Keller Police Department began investigating Maus.

Maus, when he was called to speak to HR, claimed that in the first reported instance he needed to use the restroom and couldn’t wait, so he went to the student bathroom instead of one for staff. Todd said she reviewed security camera footage from the school and found that wasn’t true.

Instead, Todd told the court, she saw footage of Maus pacing back and forth outside the bathroom until the boy went inside, then following him in. It was a common trend in surveillance video she watched.

Todd said she watched more than 400 hours of security footage, following Maus from the moment he arrived on campus to the moment he left since the start of that school year. Every time he walked into a student bathroom, which she said was nearly every time he used the restroom, she had to back up the video to see if any students were still inside and then watch until he left to see if any boys went in after him.

The detective identified at least 10 other boys who may have been abused but the boys either couldn’t endure a forensic interview or the parents wouldn’t allow their sons to be interviewed by police, she and the prosecution said.

In court Tuesday, Maus was asked about the total number of boys he has abused.

“Do you even know how many children you’ve sexually abused?” prosecutor Deanna Franzen asked.

“I do not,” he responded.

The parent of one survivor left the courtroom after Maus said that, visibly angry.

Franzen suggested he may have abused other boys when working at schools in Duncanville, which Maus said was “possible.”

Todd said she can’t know the full extent of Maus’ abuse, either. Especially in the case of boys who have survived sexual abuse, she said victims can be hesitant to come forward and that for each one who did, it was a difficult experience. In many cases, she said, even adults who hear about sexual abuse of boys might not take it as seriously as abuse of girls because of social stigmas and ideas that boys are strong enough to grow out of the trauma.

That’s not true, Todd, the parents and Ezio Leite, a psychologist and therapist who works both with sex offenders and survivors, all said. The trauma is something that almost all survivors will carry with them for the rest of their lives, regardless of their gender.

During her investigation, Todd said her office physically moved from the police station to Bear Creek Intermediate School, one of the two campuses at which Maus was working when his abuse was discovered. She interviewed teachers, students and administrators to get a full picture of the band director’s abuse and who he was.

Many school employees told her they blamed themselves for not noticing something was off about him. Students told her they saw Maus outside of student restrooms so often they thought he was a “bathroom monitor,” something Bear Creek Intermediate Principal Brenda Riebkes said the school doesn’t even have.

Maus testifies

Maus took the stand at the start of the defense’s case, telling Salvant that he is sorry for what he’s done and he’s working to become a better person. His words appeared to ring hollow to the survivors and their families in the courtroom.

He said he’s taken his therapy seriously and is on medication for obsessive compulsive disorder, which he said contributed to his actions.

When questioned by prosecutors, though, Maus admitted that he downplayed the seriousness of his abuse of boys when he started going to therapy. He said he didn’t think it was that harmful, thought since the students he victimized were male that it wasn’t as serious, claimed the survivors of his abuse were exaggerating what happened and said he felt like he was a victim for being arrested and charged.

In court Tuesday, Maus said he doesn’t still feel those things and knows he did wrong.

Pleading for leniency

Maus, his attorneys and family and friends all pleaded with Salvant to be lenient. One friend, Greg Shapley, told the judge that Maus deserved “mercy.”

Shapley said he met Maus about 20 years ago, when Maus was still in high school. He was introduced to him at church because of his musical talent and said Maus played instruments in church productions and volunteered with children at a church music summer camp while in high school.

He said that Maus deserved justice, but that his idea of justice was different than that of the survivors and their families. He said being arrested, losing his job and registering as a sex offender was justice enough. When later asked by the judge, he said he thought Maus deserved mercy. The judge asked him to define that.

“This person has obviously committed a sin, a transgression, and he has admitted to that, so we all put down our stones and walk away,” Shapley said. “That’s mercy.”

Shapley also referred to Maus’ abuse as a thorn in the man’s side, referencing the biblical writings of the apostle Paul, which one of the fathers brought up after sentencing, during victim impact statements. The father said that Paul wrote about a thorn in the side while falsely imprisoned and awaiting trial for being a Christian and that comparing Maus’ actions to the meaning behind the writer’s words wasn’t right.

When he left the stand and walked back toward the gallery, Shapley patted Maus on the shoulder reassuringly.

Maus’ sister also asked for the judge to give her brother probation instead of time behind bars, but also told the prosecution that she if she were to have children one day she can’t say she would be comfortable allowing them to be alone in a room with Maus.

Maus’ wife also testified, saying her husband has been in therapy and has admitted to his family everything he did. She pointed out that as a condition of his bond Maus has been monitored constantly with software on all his devices that allows authorities to see everything he does on computers, tablets and phones.

She said Maus, who has gotten a job as an accountant since his arrest, has been a good husband. But she, too, couldn’t say that she would allow her husband to be alone in the same room as her children. Maus’ ex-wife has received court orders preventing Maus from seeing their son in any way but supervised FaceTime calls.

Attorneys built on the idea that Maus was a good teacher, something that students and one father in victim impact statements called a ridiculous thing to worry about in light of his crimes.

Riebkes said that before she knew about the abuse she thought he was a “gifted musician and teacher,” but her opinion of him changed after she learned what he’d done to boys. The prosecution asked in closing statements if he could have actually been that good a teacher if he was spending so much time out of the classroom, standing outside bathrooms waiting for boys to abuse.

Leite, the psychologist, said that Maus has shown improvement in therapy and has been diagnosed with an obsessive compulsive disorder that leads him to act on sexual impulses to abuse boys and has been taking his medication. The defense attempted to use Maus’ desire to get treatment as a way to argue for leniency for the sake of his rehabilitation.

But when it was the prosecution’s turn to question Leite, the psychologist told the judge that Maus knew what he was doing was wrong and he still did it. He said there was a dissonance between his moral compass and his actions.

Sentencing

Salvant, the judge, said he believes in rehabilitation but that he didn’t have a choice but to sentence Maus to time behind bars because of the nature and extent of his crimes.

“That’s something I can’t quite forgive,” Salvant said. “His behavior was not only unacceptable, it was reprehensible.”

He said he hopes Maus continues working to rehabilitate himself, even in prison, but that the abuse not only of the boys but of the trust they and their families put in him as a teacher was too much.

He added that a lot of people were watching the case. That mattered because one consideration in sentencing is making an example to deter future offenders.

The sentence had people on both sides of the case crying.

During victim impact statements, Salvant was seen crying from the bench. One police officer, with tears in her eyes, plugged her ears while some of the survivors and their family spoke to Maus through distraught cries.

“It didn’t only affect me,” one of the survivors said. “Like you said, you don’t know how many other kids you did this to.”

The girl who prosecutors told the court was choked by Maus said she hasn’t had a full eight hours of sleep since she was assaulted by him. She wakes up in the middle of the night crying. She can’t let her father hug her or put an arm over her shoulder because of the trauma. Some of the survivors and family members were crying so heavily their words weren’t understandable.

One father told the court he wanted to give a victim impact statement but couldn’t.

“There’s nothing but anger,” he said. “Just too much anger.”

One of the survivors who testified left a letter with someone to read on his behalf in which he wrote that after “four years of being violated” he has felt fear, shame and regret and can’t use public restrooms. He wished he’d spoken up sooner.

The last person who spoke, one survivor’s father, said Maus’ prison sentence was a gift because prison would be safer for him than being out in the world with the families of the boys he abused. The father also said the way the defense tried to frame Maus as a normal person and a good teacher who just messed up is one reason people lack faith in the justice system, even calling out one defense attorney for being on his phone instead of paying attention during the impact statements.