Marka Bodine, a former English teacher for Tomball ISD north of Houston, Texas was sentenced to 2 months in prison for having a three-year relationship with one of her sixth-grade students, local station ABC-13 News reports.
Harris County Judge George Glass, who sentenced Bodine to 60 days in prison and 10 years of probation following her guilty plea on the charge of continuous sexual abuse of a child, gave the 32-year-old woman until June 2023 to surrender for her brief prison sentence due to the recent birth of her child, according to the report.
The light sentence came as a surprise to the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, which requested a minimum sentence of 20 years in prison, District Attorney Kim Ogg revealed in a Facebook post.
“I’m heartbroken for the complainant and his family. I’m really disappointed in the outcome as a prosecutor – a child abuse prosecutor, and I’m disappointed as a citizen of Harris County,” Harris County Prosecutor Janna Oswald, chief of the Crimes Against Children Division said.
The case came to light in April 2021, when Bodine reported to the school principal that a former student who was 16 at the time was harassing her and threatening to harm himself, affidavits revealed. During an investigation,
The student, who was between the ages of 12 and 15 at the time, said the relationship with Bodine lasted almost three years and it began in 2018 when he was a 6th-grade student of Bodine’s.
The two began chatting through the video game Fortnite and then turned to text messages. Once the student turned 13, the relationship turned sexual. Over the course of three years, Bodine sent roughly 40 explicit images of herself to the teen. Bodine had sex with the student in her classroom and in her vehicle, according to court documents.
