Sometime between late October and early November 2023, an Alamance-Burlington elementary school principal allegedly walked into a nine-year-old student’s math class, led him down a hallway and into a boys’ bathroom, and sexually assaulted him.
Jurors heard opening arguments Monday morning in the trial of former Eastlawn Elementary School principal Daniel McInnis, 46, white, male, of 632 Country Club Drive, Burlington, who is charged with: statutory sex offense with a child by an adult; sex act with a student; indecent liberties with a child; and sexual battery.
The exact date on which the offense allegedly occurred is not known, based on the bill of indictment that an Ala-mance County jury returned this summer.
McInnis has pleaded not guilty. He has no prior criminal record, and if convicted, faces a maximum prison sentence of up to of up to 434 months, plus 60 days (for a total of about 36 years), Alamance County senior resident superior court judge C. Douglas Green said at the start of jury selection last week.
The alleged victim, now 12, claims he had been in his math class when McInnis walked in, told the teacher he needed to speak with him, and led him down a hallway to a boys’ bathroom, where he sexually assaulted the child.
There is no physical evidence of the alleged assault, based on statements made in open court and court filings. Nor were there any witnesses at Eastlawn, where 529 students were enrolled during the fall of 2023.
At the time the allegation was made, McInnis had worked as an assistant principal and principal at Eastlawn since November 2012 and was named the ABSS assistant principal of the year in October 2016. Throughout his trial and pretrial hearings, he has been flanked by nearly two dozen former colleagues, many wearing ribbons, in the same hue of blue used in the school’s colors, pinned to their clothing as a show of support, along with his wife and family.
Law enforcement officers, victim’s advocates, and a handful of supporters have been seated behind the prosecutor since the trial began inside the second-floor courtroom at Alamance County’s Historic Court House.
In her opening statement, the prosecutor, Alamance County assistant district attorney Elizabeth Olivier, told jurors, “This is a case about a normal child, where the school principal, who’s supposed to keep children safe…takes the most vulnerable and does the unimaginable.”
“Nine-year-old [alleged student victim] lives in Burlington and goes to Eastlawn Elementary School,” Olivier said in an opening statement that ran about 10 minutes. “He’s in the fourth grade. Every day he gets up, and his mom takes him to school…Every day appears to be a normal day.
“But one day, at the end of 2023, he goes to school – [it] appears to be a normal day – [and] his school principal comes into the classroom, walks him down the hallway, takes him in the bathroom, and tells him to go into the stall. His back is to the principal’s front. His pants are pulled down, [and he] hears the principal’s belt unbuckled, and his pants are pulled down. The next thing [he knows], the principal’s penis is in his butt. [He] doesn’t know what to do. He goes back to class and goes throughout his day. At that point his world is turned upside down.”
Olivier told jurors that they would later hear testimony that the child has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. “I ask you to pay careful attention to all of the evidence; I ask you to use your common sense.”
Defense: Victim changes story ‘to fit what makes sense’
Lisa A. Dubs of Hickory, who along with Graham attorney John W. Cox is defending McInnis, told jurors during her opening statement, “The one thing the evidence is going to show in this case is nothing makes sense – nothing makes any sense whatsoever.”
In the fall of 2023, McInnis had been living the life he had dreamed of, Dubs said in an opening statement for the defense that ran about 25 minutes. “It was not just a job – [it was] a calling, the thing he wanted to devote his life to,” she said.
When McInnis began working at Eastlawn, the state had designated the elementary school as low-performing because its end-of-grade test scores were at the bottom. Within three years, he “had changed the whole character of the school,” raised the test scores, and created an atmosphere of success in which teachers and the administration worked together to help every student succeed academically, Dubs said. “Everything in that school was working,” she told the jury.
“The allegation is that Dan walked into a classroom during math class and took [the alleged victim] to the bathroom just a few doors down and raped him and nobody saw a thing,” Dubs said. “Everything Dan had worked for, in the couple of minutes it took a student to make an allegation, it all came crashing down.”
The defense contends that years prior to the allegation, the student’s “history at Eastlawn had been spotty,” and at one point he’d dropped off the school’s attendance rolls altogether. “[His] medical records show us that, in May of that year, he was at a local doctor,” and when the doctor asked how school was going, the boy’s mother said it was going great, Dubs said. He stopped attending school again on November 22, 2023, when, the defense attorney said, “He disappears again.”
According to a timeline laid out by the defense attorney, the child’s mother, Tania Perez, called the school around November 23, 2023 and reported that her younger son, then six and in the first grade at Eastlawn, was being bullied and didn’t want to come to school. On December 6, 2023, the mother called the school and “tells them that [her younger son], the first-grader, says that a man has touched him on the butt…Mom goes in and does all the talking.”
During a meeting with school administrators, “[The younger brother] describes three people standing” in front of him – “can’t tell you who they are,” Dubs said during her opening statement. “[He] says, no, it wasn’t the principal. You will see the progression, it changes over time,” she told the jury.
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“This is a case about a normal child, where the school principal, who’s supposed to keep children safe. . . takes the most vulnerable and does the unimaginable.”
– Alamance County assistant D.A. Elizabeth Olivier
“The allegation is that Dan walked into a classroom during math class and took [the alleged victim] to the bathroom just a few doors down and raped him and nobody saw a thing. Everything Dan had worked for, in the couple of minutes it took a student to make an allegation, it all came crashing down.”
– Defense attorney Lisa A. Dubs
“Allegations are swirling,” Dubs told the jury. “The mom is saying it could be the principal.” Text messages that teachers, substitutes, and school administrators exchanged during that time revealed that McInnis “is taking himself out of any context whatsoever with either [of the Perez children]. You get all the way to November 21, 2023 – that was the original day that Dan allegedly did this.
“You will see it changes,” Dubs told jurors Monday morning. “It changes, not because it was not precise – [he] was pretty darned precise. It changes because there were people in the class and who knew [he] was in the class…You will see that [his] story has changed…to fit the timeline, to fit what makes sense.”
The State Bureau of Investigation investigated the initial claim that the six-year-old boy had been sexually assaulted at school and found it to be unsubstantiated, based on an earlier motion filed by the defense. No charges were ever filed.
Two days later, on December 8, 2023, the mother reported that McInnis had sexually assaulted her nine-year-old son, according to the defense.
“You’re going to hear his biggest fear is men following him – not the principal following him,” Dubs said during her opening statement. She pointed out that there are best practices, among professionals trained in child sexual abuse, to interview children in order to get as close to the truth as possible, but if a child is asked the same question repeatedly, as the alleged victim was during a forensic interview at CrossRoads in Burlington on December 8, 2023, “eventually the child figures out they’re giving the wrong answer, and they change the story,” Dubs said.
“He said [the principal put his penis] in there and nothing else happened,” the attorney said. “Remember the state saying, ‘he put it in there, and there was movement.’
“If you’re describing that particular activity, there ought to be some sensation,” Dubs said. “If you’re a child, it ought to be painful.” But when asked during the forensic interview what his body felt like, the alleged victim said, “‘It felt normal,’” the defense attorney said.
A subsequent medical examination of the alleged victim was “unremarkable,” revealing no tearing or bruising, Dubs said. “Most of the things that caused that doctor to make a diagnosis that this was consistent with sexual abuse…almost everything is based on what mom says. She bases it on mom’s description of how he’s acting.”
The doctor later testified that the mother’s statements were not relevant to her diagnosis, which was based on “internal consistencies” in the child’s account of the incident; sensory experiences; and his cognitive experience, among other factors, including the boy’s description of symptoms such as nightmares, insomnia, “significant intrusive thoughts,” and other characteristics that she testified were consistent with child abuse and trauma. The boy described being fearful; his mother described him as being tearful without provocation, based on testimony that jurors heard from the doctor Tuesday afternoon.
‘I feel real bad about what happened’
“The state will say, ‘[the alleged victim] knows details,’” the defense attorney said. “For instance, he gave a lot of detail about how you get to the bathroom from the classroom…Actually, it puts you outside of the school.’” A teacher whose classroom is next door to the boy’s bathroom where the assault was said to have occurred told investigators, “She can even hear the sound of children urinating,” Dubs said. The first teacher who was interviewed told investigators, “No, the principal never came in the classroom.” Then the student said maybe it was a substitute, Dubs told jurors in her opening statement. “Every single one of them says, ‘No, Mr. McInnis never came in the classroom.’
“You’re going to hear Dan gave up everything he had to molest only [this] boy from this family, in a very public place.” But when police showed up at his home on December 29, 2023, they seized all of his electronic devices and searched for child pornography and online chat rooms for child sexual predators, but found nothing, Dubs said. “Now it’s out in the community that he’s accused of molesting a child,” she added. “He’s been a principal to thousands of children. Not a single person comes forward and says, ‘That happened to me.’”
Even after the mother reported that McInnis had sexually assaulted her son, “she sends him to school the very next day,” Dubs told the jury.
The following year, the student was in the fifth grade at Eastlawn, and allegedly told his teacher, Xavier Jones, who had never met McInnis, “‘I feel real bad about what happened to Mr. McInnis…My parents told me to say it,’” said Dubs.
“What you’re going to hear is there’s probably a very good reason why [the alleged victim] can’t say, ‘This is not what happened,’” Dubs forecast for the jury.
McInnis remains employed with ABSS; he has been suspended without pay since early 2024, according to school officials. Jones is no longer employed with ABSS and currently lives in Charlotte, based on a subpoena the defense has issued for him to testify at the trial.
Dr. Dana Hagele, who conducted a child medical evaluation on the alleged victim, testified Tuesday afternoon that it wasn’t unusual for there to be no anal fissures or bruising, particularly if some time had passed, because that part of the body is heavily “vascularized,” meaning there are a lot of blood vessels in that area.
Hagele also testified Tuesday that it isn’t unusual for child victims of sexual assault to not be able to consistently recall details of the assault afterwards. She concluded that the boy’s symptoms, behavior, and other factors were consistent with “a single incidence of anal penetration.” She said that the child told her he hurt a little at the time and then “it hurted” a lot later that day, which she took to mean that it was painful when he defecated.
Green closed the courtroom later Monday morning to all spectators, including reporters, except for the attorneys, jurors, and the boy’s parents, for about 1½ hours so the jury could hear the alleged victim’s testimony (see related story, this edition).
Outside the jury’s presence later Monday, the defense attorneys said that, prior to testifying, the boy had been escorted to the Historic Court House by a group of bikers, Bikers Against Child Abuse, who had been directed to come to the courthouse by one of two Spanish-language interpreters who were present in the courtroom throughout Monday’s proceedings.
Outside of the jury’s presence, Cox told Green that someone approached him and told him about the escort the bikers gave the child to the Historic Court House. “[The defense] would have some concern with court interpreters being advocates for one side or the other” in the case, he said.
Green responded, “I will look at that and review it in my discretion. People are going to come up and say a whole bunch of things…I don’t know who came up to you and said this. I don’t want to unnecessarily bog down the court proceedings. Let’s be careful, have some type of filter – this is for both sides.”
Motive?
The defense contends that the alleged victim fabricated the assault in hopes of sparing his family from deportation.
Federal immigration law allows undocumented immigrants and their families who are victims of certain types of crime and who cooperate with law enforcement to apply for and obtain a “U-Visa,” enabling them to remain in the U.S. and eventually become lawful permanent residents, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency.
The prosecutor unsuccessfully sought to prevent that information from being introduced into evidence at McInnis’ trial, based on a motion Olivier filed on October 15, in which she asserted that “any evidence regarding the victim’s or his family members’ immigration status or their inquiries about a U Visa” is irrelevant.
The Perez family met with attorneys at McKinney Immigration Law in the fall of 2024, based on a subpoena that the defense filed on October 19 seeking records of meetings with the family. Those records have not yet been furnished; subsequent court filings indicate that a representative from McKinney may be called to testify.
Green agreed at a pretrial hearing two weeks ago to allow the defense to mention the U-Visa application but not the fact that the victim’s family is supposedly under an active deportation order.
Olivier also sought unsuccessfully to prevent the defense from calling an expert in federal immigration law and the procedures for obtaining a U-Visa, attorney Helen Parsonage of Winston-Salem, to testify at McInnis’ trial.
Jurors later watched an hourlong recording of a forensic interview that Graham police detective Ada Cabanillas conducted with the student on December 8, 2023 at the request of CrossRoads Sexual Assault and Response Center in Burlington.
In addition to Cabanillas, jurors on Monday heard testimony from Meredith Peffley, the executive director CrossRoads. Both witnesses described the process of assessing potential child physical or sexual abuse and the techniques that forensic interviewers employ in order to get a child to make a “disclosure.”
Peffley described the nonprofit as a “trauma-informed resource center” that works to understand what the child is there for and to provide crisis intervention, therapy, and treatment plans, as well as other assistance to victims of trauma.
During her cross-examination of Peffley, Dubs questioned the apparent assumption that all CrossRoads clients are victims. “Our goal is to [be a] bridge between the victim mentality to the survivor mentality – to get them out of the crisis to the healing,” Peffley testified, confirming for the defense that the alleged victim had been referred to therapy in January 2024. Referrals to CrossRoads for forensic interviews are made by law enforcement or social services, whose job it is to investigate the underlying allegations, the director testified.
The detective testified that she had no details of the case going into the forensic interview and moved from general topics – such as questions about the boy’s hobbies – to “directed” questions about what she termed “body safety” and what types of things he does to keep his body safe.
“When I ask questions, I’m not just listening to the child,” Cabanillas said. “I’m looking at his demeanor.” She recalled on the witness stand that his voice was low, he was slouching, and he was coloring. “I have to explore that,” she explained.
Cabanillas asked what types of things the boy would do if he felt unsafe and asked several follow-up questions, as she termed them, before delving into the alleged sexual assault. The student said he would tell his teacher if he saw someone strange come into class and tell his mom when he got home. He described “strangers following him in school,” which the detective noted, is “not normal for a child to say.”
Early on in the interview, the boy told the detective that he would tell a teacher if someone is following him, but said he had never had to do anything like that.
He didn’t initially respond when Cabanillas asked if he felt safe at school, prompting her to repeat the question. He said he didn’t because “a lot of people are following him, and other kids wouldn’t notice.” He then told the detective he hadn’t seen that before.
“Are these people like staff or students?” the detective asked the child. “Maybe something happened to you that we can help?”
The student then went into his account of how the principal pulled him out of math class, took him to the bathroom, and touched his “bottom.” Asked for more detail, the child eventually told the detective, “He touched me more and more.” As that phase of the interview progressed, the student became more detailed in his account of the alleged assault inside what he described as the first stall inside the boys’ bathroom on the fourth-grade hallway inside Eastlawn Elementary School.
The alleged victim said that after the assault, he pulled up his own pants and underwear, as did the principal, who told him he was done and to go back to his classroom.
Dubs countered that nothing in Cabanillas’ training as a forensic interviewer was designed to gauge the suggestibility of a child, or whether the allegation is true or false.
The detective, however, explained that she asks several baseline questions whether a child can differentiate between a lie and the truth before proceeding with the interview.
During cross-examination of the detective, Dubs also seemed to key in on the fact that numerous studies and court precedents have shown that leading and/or repeated questions tend to increase the likelihood that children would make false claims of sexual abuse.
Dubs pointed out, “The fact of the matter is, every time you introduced a topic, it was always related to some type of abuse,” asking whether she had explored whether the child’s account of being followed at school could’ve been related to his status as an undocumented immigrant.
“You said, ‘I don’t understand, tell me more,’” Dubs said, referring to the child’s claims of being followed at school. “He said, ‘they will act like they’re not following; they will act normal.’ Then you ask are they like students or staff.” Dubs said that was the first mention of the word “staff” during the forensic interview, suggesting that it was Cabanillas who introduced the notion of school staff following the student.
“You said, ‘Maybe there was something that happened at school that made you feel not safe,’” the defense attorney said.“Did you say, where are those strangers – what they looked like, had he ever seen them before, what they were wearing?’”
Cabanillas acknowledged she had not.
Throughout the forensic interview at CrossRoads on December 8, 2023, the boy never made eye contact with Cabanillas while he colored a picture of a puppy, from the children’s animated series Paw Patrol, in a coloring book, training his focus instead on switching between colored markers as he moved from coloring the dog’s fur to its tongue and collar, before filling in the grass and sky.
Dressed in shorts, Crocs, socks, and a speckled black Champion hoodie, the child occasionally stared down at a low-pile shag area rug and picked at its fibers as he sat on the floor, beside an ottoman at the foot of an oversized chair, as the detective questioned him repeatedly about what he thought and how his body felt after the alleged assault. The alleged victim was unemotional during the interview but said he felt “worried” after the alleged assault, based on the recording of the forensic interview that was shown to jurors Monday afternoon.
“What else did you feel when you worried?” Cabanillas asked.
He responded, “That I would go home and tell my mom.”
Details from the investigation that are publicly available – some court documents have been filed under seal – do not make clear why the mother apparently waited two weeks to contact police.
Cabanillas admitted under cross-examination that she left the interview room briefly, where she conferred with investigators in an adjoining room, and they asked her to get more details from the alleged victim.
Hagele, the doctor, said she based her “clinical conclusion” of a single incidence of anal penetration on the symptoms he was describing sensory details – what the boy experienced, what he had been thinking, what he had been feeling – that she said were “all generated by the child.”
Both Hagele and Cabanillas highlighted one of the sensory details – the “tingling” sound that the principal’s belt allegedly made as he unfastened his own pants – that the alleged victim had described mentioned during his medical evaluation and forensic interview at CrossRoads.
Dubs subsequently questioned how the doctor had arrived at her conclusion. Hagele admitted under cross-examination that the child’s mother, who only speaks Spanish, had described to her through an interpreter how her son would cry without provocation and began to experience “school avoidance” after the alleged assault. Hagele said she would’ve arrived at the same conclusions about the child, absent that information from his mother.
The two-hour medical evaluation of the child was typed into a 20-some page “template” that Hagele said was then turned into a report required by the state, which was also submitted to law enforcement and/or the Department of Social Services. Hagele said she sometimes used a scratch pad, similar to sticky notes, to note things that don’t lend themselves to typing during the evaluation, but insisted that they’re shredded soon thereafter. Altogether, the process took about 10 hours, to include reviewing the case with a “multi-disciplinary team” at CrossRoads, Hagele testified Tuesday.
Pressing the doctor on the procedure she used, “the protocol”– the “framework,” the doctor interjected – to arrive at her “clinical conclusion” about what had happened to the child, Dubs asked, “That framework, whatever, is important for you to know if a child is agreeing with whatever an adult says, or if he will correct you…Yet you do not memorialize, in your sticky notes, that, do you?”
Hagele responded, “I do not write down where that happens. This isn’t a forensic interview; it’s a child medical evaluation.”
The defense attorney asked, “Is your answer, ‘Correct, Ms. Dubs, I do not have that documented anywhere.’ You’re willing to testify, but your answer is, ‘you just have to trust me.’”
Hagele reiterated that she’s a licensed medical professional.
“It sounds like part of your answer,” Dubs continued, “is ‘Just trust me, I’m a doctor,’ correct?”
The attorney pointed to another statement in Hagele’s report of the child medical evaluation in which the boy clarified that he’d heard a “tingling noise” when the principal unbuckled his own belt, which the child said had been “a noise, not a sensation.”
“We don’t introduce new words,” Hagele testified. “To me, it’s a sensory word; he said it’s a noise.”
Defense alludes to sloppy police investigation
Meanwhile, Wednesday afternoon, Brittany Benfield, who led the investigation for the Burlington police department but left the department in July 2024, admitted under cross-examination by Dubs that she had neither visited nor photographed the actual scene of the alleged crime. Nor had she gone to Clinkscales’ classroom, where the student claimed to have been when McInnis pulled him out of math class.
None of the current and former staff at Eastlawn Elementary School – many of whom the defense has subpoenaed to testify at McInnis’ trial – has corroborated the account of the alleged sexual assault, nor being removed from the classroom.
Benfield said she had interviewed the student’s math teacher, Sheila Clinkscales, on December 12, 2023, and the teacher recalled having a doctor’s appointment a week or two prior to the alleged assault and said her class possibly had been covered by a substitute, Evelin Fagan, but couldn’t remember the date.
Benfield said she had interviewed eight teachers at Eastlawn but hadn’t spoken with two teachers, Amanda Cvijanovic and Shavon Via, whose classrooms at the time were on either side of the boys’ bathroom where the assault allegedly occurred. (Neither teacher remains employed at Eastlawn; Via has since transferred to a different elementary school.)
Benfield admitted under cross-examination that she interviewed Cvijanovic and Via on February 23, 2024 – which Dubs noted was two months’ after McInnis’ arrest – at the behest of the school resource officer, Bret Currie, whom the defense attorney said is a retired Special Victims Unit detective.
“You didn’t even find out until February, when you were interviewing two teachers who asked to speak to you…whether [the student’s] classroom was on a fourth-grade hallway.”
“Did you ever go out and look for actual evidence?” Dubs asked Benfield. “Did you ever go to the crime scene? Did you take photographs?”
Benfield agreed that it might’ve been important to have gone to the actual crime scene but said she had obtained a floor plan that gave her a general idea of the layout. She also admitted she made no attempt to see whether the directions that the student gave for how to get from his math class to the bathroom were accurate. “Based on the directions [he] gave, it wouldn’t have been possible, based on the floor plan,” Benfield acknowledged, adding that the child’s directions “weren’t extremely pertinent to me.”
The former Burlington police detective said she learned from the forensic interview that the assault had occurred near the end of math class and assumed that the student had returned to the same classroom. Benfield said it might’ve been “possibly, but not necessarily” helpful to speak with one of the child’s teachers about his behavior immediately following the alleged incident.
Benfield testified that “the focus of my entire investigation” was to have the child complete a forensic interview and medical exam; determine the family dynamics and why police weren’t contacted sooner; to determine whether any other adults had access to the child and whether the child or his parents had made this allegation before.
The jury in McInnis’ trial consists of: five white males; four black females; and three white females. Two white females and one white male have been selected as alternate jurors.
Testimony is scheduled to resume this morning inside the county’s Historic Court House. The trial is expected to run through next Friday, November 13.
