A jury on Wednesday found a former Chicago Public Schools dean guilty of multiple felony counts for sexually abusing a student, after the young woman testified that he coerced her into a relationship years earlier while she attended a Little Village high school.
But after deliberating for nearly three hours, the jury also acquitted Brian Crowder, 43, of three of the seven felony sex charges he faced.
Earlier in the afternoon, Cook County prosecutors had asked jurors to hold Crowder accountable for using his position of power to prey on a 15-year-old girl.
On Tuesday, jurors began hearing testimony in the case against Crowder, whose conduct took place while he was serving as an associate dean at the Social Justice High School, a part of Little Village Lawndale High School.
In their final pitch to the jury at the Leighton Criminal Court Building, prosecutors displayed a smiling photograph of a girl and asked the jury to remember that she was a child.
“She was young. She was vulnerable,” said Assistant State’s Attorney Sarah Kofoed. “The defendant saw that saw a young impressionable girl was looking for love, and he moved in on that.”
The Tribune is not naming the woman because she is alleged to be the victim in a sexual assault case.
During closing arguments, though, Crowder’s attorneys called the relationship a “friendship” and said the case was a matter of “he said, she said.” They argued that she sought money from Crowder.
“You’re not called upon to decide whether Brian Crowder should be employed at Chicago Public Schools,” attorney Barry Sheppard said. “Bad judgment doesn’t make you a criminal.”
The jury reached a verdict after deliberating for about three hours.
The woman, who is now 26, testified for hours on Tuesday, describing how Crowder first approached her in the school’s lunchroom when she was around 15 and asked her for her SnapChat username. She was initially confused, she said, but he reassured her he wouldn’t add her as a friend.
“That makes sense in my head because he was my school dean,” she testified.
But he did connect with her on the app, and began sending her inappropriate messages, she said. They soon developed a relationship.
The woman told the jury that Crowder forced her to get abortions when she got pregnant twice.
She wept as she watched the closing arguments a day after she testified.
“He wasn’t just a teacher. At that point he was the dean of discipline,” Kofoed said, adding that he controlled whether she received punishments at school. “He controlled the relationship because he was in power.”
During the state’s rebuttal, Assistant State’s Attorney John Sviokla addressed the defense’s argument of a financial motivation.
“She looked to be made whole in some capacity,” he said.
The case went before a jury as CPS’ handling of sexual abuse allegations has been the subject of scrutiny in recent years and as Crowder is also named in a 2024 lawsuit that accuses CPS of failing to protect its students.
In 2018, the Chicago Tribune’s “Betrayed” investigation revealed failures in how the nation’s fourth-largest school district handled allegations of abuse, including neglecting to report accusations to police or child welfare investigators and failing to conduct effective background checks.
The civil complaint filed by the woman against Crowder and the school district heavily references the Tribune’s investigation and alleges that CPS at the time “did not track child abuse by its employees or agents in a publicly available format.”
The lawsuit also accuses employees at Little Village Lawndale High School of failing to act when an inappropriate relationship between Crowder and the student was noticed by others who “would joke about how much time was spent alone” between Crowder and the student.
At one point, the suit alleges, the student told a teacher about her relationship with Crowder, but the teacher never took steps to report or stop the abuse.