Simone Wilson“Emmanuel De La Rosa doesn't teach a typical high school shop class,” wrote online USC newspaper Neon Tommy in December 2011.
Giving sick new connotations to that lede, Fontana police arrested 27-year-old De La Rosa last weekend for child endangerment at A.B. Miller High School. They found that he let a sadistic student hazing ritual go on right under his nose — and may have even “authorized the hazing,” according to the Press-Enterprise.
Four students were reportedly arrested as well…
… although the only one old enough to be named is 18-year-old Fernando Manuel Salgado.
De La Rosa, left, and the arrested 18-year-old.; Credit: New York Daily News
The student's charges — assault, child cruelty and attempted sodomy with a person under the age of 18, according to his San Bernardino County arrest record — hint at the horrific nature of the alleged hazing.
Salgado is listed as 5-feet-9-inches tall and 250 pounds. His teacher, De La Rosa, is just over 6 feet tall, and weighs 280 pounds.
The Los Angeles Times says that “all three of the victims were male juveniles whose injuries were minor and did not require hospitalization.” More from the Press-Enterprise:
School officials became aware of the incident sometime after the summer school session started on May 31 and called police, the release stated. The hazing incident appears to have been confined to one classroom and involved students in that single class.
In the Neon Tommy story on De La Rosa, he's described as a masonry teacher who specializes in bricklaying. His advanced students sometimes operate heavy machinery like forklifts and backhoes.
From the profile:
De La Rosa began teaching three years ago after work in his field began to slow. He had fallen in love with the craft of masonry in his senior year of high school, and he went into an apprenticeship program at age 18. This was the beginning of an eight year career in the trade.
… Still, it's tough for him to get students interested. During the first week of school, he says, some students go to the school offices begging, in tears, to switch out of the class. They're not used to backbreaking work. “It's not for the weak,” he says.
According to a police statement on the shocking summer-school crimes, De La Rosa “facilitated some students to carry out the hazing to limit behavioral problems within the classroom” and “may have directed students to assault another student.”
We've contacted Fontana police for updates on the investigation. But tell us: Have you taken a class from De La Rosa? Did he seem like the type of guy who would let this kind of depravity play out in his own classroom?
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