Note: This story contains descriptions of sexual assault. If you or someone you know may be a victim of sexual assault, confidential support, information and advice are available at the National Sexual Assault Hotline by calling 800-656-4673. Text chat is also available online.

For nearly two decades, Gene Evans was the public face of state agencies responsible for protecting Oregon’s children and holding accountable people who abuse them.

As spokesperson for the Oregon Department of Education and the Department of Human Services, Evans was regularly quoted in news outlets around the region on the well-being of students and investigations into physical abuse against children, including at Oregon schools.

“Our highest priority is the safety and protection of children,” Evans, then a state spokesman, said in a 2012 column in The Oregonian.

But a woman who was a student of his at St. Helens High School in the late 1980s says Evans groomed and sexually assaulted her when he was a teacher. Another student says he groomed and then forced her to grope him. In interviews with OPB, two other former students say he inappropriately touched them during classes.

Evans was never charged with any crime. When OPB visited his Lake Oswego home on March 12, he declined to comment and closed the door. OPB was later unable to reach Evans by phone and sent a certified letter that arrived at his home on March 14. OPB did not receive any response prior to publication.

OPB first received an email in late 2024 about Evans from one of the women accusing him of abuse. That email arrived soon after police had arrested one current and one former teacher at St. Helens on multiple allegations of sexual abuse, which spawned citywide protests from students and parents.

Over the past three months, OPB conducted interviews with 13 people with some knowledge of the events, including the women who say Evans abused them, family members, students and former St. Helens teachers from the period when Evans taught at the high school. OPB also reviewed contemporary diary and yearbook entries from Evans’ accusers. The women who accused Evans of sexual abuse were interviewed multiple times.

Those conversations and documents paint a picture of a teacher popular with students but whose attentiveness drew whispers that he had crossed lines.

They also suggest that the St. Helens School District lacked a firm system for protecting students – and holding adults who are accused of abuse accountable – for decades.

OPB found court records of at least four St. Helens school employees convicted of sex crimes involving minors over a 40-year period. They include Emil Torquato, a St. Helens High track coach who pleaded guilty to sexual abuse in the third degree in 1995, and Jan Gleaves, a teacher’s aide at the high school who pleaded guilty to sexual abuse in the third degree in 2009.

Because the abuse Evans is accused of committing took place almost four decades ago, compiling a complete, detailed account of what occurred is difficult. At least one teacher said he told the then-principal at St. Helens High School that he suspected Evans was behaving inappropriately with a student, but it’s unclear whether administrators did anything with that information.

Stacey Mendoza, a spokesperson for the St. Helens School District, said in a March 18 statement that the district office found no complaints or reports made against Evans.

Oregon law at the time required that people considered to be mandatory reporters, including any school employee, immediately call state authorities or local law enforcement if they have “reasonable cause” to believe that a child is being abused. OPB has not found evidence that anyone in a position of authority reported accusations against Evans to law enforcement.

Evans left his position in St. Helens in July 1988, according to a letter of resignation OPB obtained in a public records request. In the letter, Evans said he was “moving to Eugene to pursue other career interests.”

But according to one woman OPB spoke with, he was planning to move to Eugene to continue a sexual relationship with her. She was 17 at the time. The woman, her family members and two of her former classmates said in recent interviews that Evans and the woman eventually lived together in Eugene.

Last November, police arrested two St. Helens High School employees — choir teacher Eric Stearns and retired math teacher Mark Collins — on multiple charges of sexually abusing students.

Police said school administrators had known of the accusations of abuse for years and never reported the incidents to the police or state government. Police also arrested St. Helens High School principal Katy Wagner on charges of criminal mistreatment for not forwarding reports of sexual abuse to authorities. School board Chair Ryan Scholl resigned last fall, and Superintendent Scot Stockwell resigned March 12 following months on paid leave.

The arrests came less than a year after the St. Helens School District agreed to pay $3.5 million to a former student who was 14 when coach and teacher Kyle Wroblewski, who had been the subject of complaints of inappropriate behavior from students and colleagues for years, abused her. In 2019, Wroblewski pleaded guilty to five counts of sexual abuse and was sentenced to more than four years in jail.

According to the court ruling, a jury could conclude district officials “had actual knowledge that Wroblewski posed a substantial risk of abuse to students.”

Peter Janci, the attorney representing Wroblewski’s victim, told OPB on March 13 it was clear during that case that the district had a culture of not taking claims of sexual assault seriously.

“It’s ultimately a culture issue,” Janci said. “It’s ultimately an issue of the people who are in charge getting it and caring enough about abuse to commit to doing whatever is reasonably necessary to make sure that it doesn’t happen.”

The district school board this month passed a corrective action plan to address the issue of sexual abuse. That includes hiring a school resource officer, monthly meetings with local police and conducting an annual culture survey. Mendoza said this plan “raises the standard” for preventing sexual abuse.

“We are serious about this issue and want every student to feel safe and secure in school,” Mendoza wrote. “We are working diligently to earn back their trust.”

‘We felt special around Gene’

As the St. Helens School District’s current sexual abuse scandal continues to unravel, more alumni are coming forward with stories that suggest a culture of abuse without accountability has plagued the system for decades.

That includes Jodie Westing. In 2014, she encountered Gene Evans again for the first time in decades: Sitting in her home office, she heard his voice on the radio during an OPB news report about the state human services department. Westing said she doesn’t remember exactly what Evans said, just that he was speaking on behalf of the Department of Human Services. But she remembers distinctly how it made her feel.

“The irony floored me,” Westing said. “I completely remember where I was sitting, the sound of his voice and the way my heartbeat increased. I had no idea he was in that sort of position.”

According to former students at St. Helens High, Evans was the cool teacher on campus back in 1987.

Students recalled him as charming, funny and stylish. He dressed more like they did than many of the older teachers — preferring faded black jeans, leather jackets and blazers — and listened to many of the same musical artists, like Sting, The Cult and The Cure. His classroom was a popular gathering place for students, several said.

“The boys liked him, the girls liked he was just so charming, and so he was a very likable person,” said Janell Kittleson, a student at the time. “I guess we felt special around Gene.”

In the fall of 1987, Kittleson said in a recent interview, Evans had called Kittleson on her home phone and asked about her best friend Jodie Westing: He wanted to know what her interests were, what kind of bands she liked. Kittleson remembers initially feeling strange about the call.

“I thought, ‘Why is he calling me at home?’” she said. “Back then I thought it was just being curious about my friends.”

Westing was a 17-year-old senior, she said, when she met Evans. Evans was 31, married with an infant son, and was in his fourth year teaching at St. Helens High School, according to district records.

He began leaving typed notes for Westing on her desk during the fall, Westing and Kittleson both said. Westing did not keep the notes, but recalled that in them Evans called her beautiful, told her no one else understood her the way he did and included drawings of her jumping hurdles.

That progressed to Evans buying her cassette tapes of bands such as Squeeze and INXS, and buying her jewelry and necklaces, she said. She still has a pin of U2’s debut album “Boy” and two brooches that she said Evans gave her.

Evans began attending her track meets, Westing said, and started spending more time with her closest group of friends after school, driving them around St. Helens in his Isuzu Trooper.

Evans drove them to concerts in Portland, she said, including Sting and INXS at Veterans Memorial Coliseum, and they all ate at restaurants in Portland after the school’s winter dance.

Occasionally, Westing said, she and Evans would drive around alone, with Evans sometimes holding her hand. That eventually progressed into kissing. Over spring break in 1988, she said, they had sex for the first time when she was 17. At the time, Oregon law said anyone under the age of 18 “is incapable of consenting to a sexual act.”

The statute of limitations — 12 years — has passed, so it’s unlikely Evans would face any criminal charges from these allegations.

Even after Westing broke off contact with Evans in the early 1990s, she said it took years to view his behavior toward her as predatory. Looking back, she said, she realizes how isolated she was.

“Grieving those years of my life and that transition, and the friends that I didn’t have from high school, and the friends that I didn’t make in college — in no way was that appropriate,” she said. “That was me being manipulated.”

Westing said she always felt out of place growing up in a small paper mill town, and Evans’ attention made her feel important and special.

“I think there was a part of me that was so thirsty for attention and validation,” she said. “I think I knew it was wrong, and on the other side of that it was also exciting.

“But after having my own two kids become 17, I thought there’s no way that you have the power to push back against that kind of attention.”

A similar pattern

OPB spoke with three other former students who say Evans engaged in a similar pattern — buying them gifts, writing them notes and complimenting their appearance — with the earliest allegations coming in 1986.

According to the three former students, Evans would touch female students in his photography classroom in a way that made girls feel uncomfortable. One student told OPB that Evans once leaned the entire front of his body against her back while she stood over a desk processing photos, placing his groin against her buttocks. The student said she now believes Evans was “testing the waters.”

Another student, who agreed to let OPB use her middle name of Lee, said she was a 15-year-old sophomore in 1986 when she took Evans’ photography class. Lee said Evans complimented her looks and playfully touched her shoulders during class. She wasn’t concerned at first, and she said that at the time it felt good to receive the positive attention.

Soon, she said, Evans started giving her gifts, including a turquoise bolo tie from Nordstrom and an air-brushed painting of Sting, one of Lee’s favorite singers, that Evans told her had been made by his sister. Lee said she received deliveries of flowers to the school office with notes that read, “You know who this is from,” that she said were from Evans.

According to Lee, Evans would routinely write her notes to excuse her from other classes during his break period, under the auspices of completing her photography homework. She said Evans forced her to grope and kiss him in the school darkroom “at least a dozen” times.

“I’d never even made out with anybody at that point,” Lee said. “To me, that was the most traumatizing thing, because I didn’t even know what I needed to be doing.”

Lee didn’t tell anyone what was happening, but she said Evans would call her regularly at home while her parents were still working. Her older sister overheard one phone call over Christmas break, she said.

Lee’s sister told OPB that Evans had previously made advances on her as well, including pressing his body against hers in the photography dark room. Listening in on the other house phone, she said, she realized that Lee was talking with Evans. Lee recalled her sister bursting into her room, grabbing the phone and telling Evans to leave her sister alone immediately.

Lee said the abuse stopped at that point, and she only talked to Evans during class time.

Months later, Lee said she was driving to a friend’s house late one night when she spotted Evans’ car in the parking lot of the St. Helens Hospital.

Inside, she said, she saw Evans and Westing kissing.

“I was like, ‘Shit, it’s not just me,’” she said. “It made me realize the kind of predator he really was.”

Lee didn’t talk to Westing about what she saw that night or her own experience with Evans.

‘I gave up everything’

During the spring of 1988, Evans and Westing were spending increasing amounts of time with each other, Westing said.

Westing said it was a secret known only to a small group of close friends. OPB interviewed three of those friends, who said Evans had become part of the friend group.

That was until Evans joined Westing and her friends on a trip to Oceanside, Oregon during spring break in 1988. On the beach, while Evans and Westing held hands, fellow St. Helens teacher Gerry Tinkle saw them together.

Tinkle, now retired and living in Columbia County, said he still remembers the odd impression it left on him. By that time, he had already grown suspicious of his colleague and how much time Evans spent around Westing, who was on his track team, he said.

“There was something going on, and I didn’t like it, and I reported it to the principal,” Tinkle said.

What Principal Zan Freeburn did with that information is unclear; Tinkle said he never followed up. Freeburn died in 2017.

It wasn’t long before Westing’s parents also found out. In early May, someone called her family phone. Her mother answered and the person played a robotic message that said, “Jodie is seeing Mr. Evans,” according to Westing’s mother and brother, both of whom spoke to OPB.

Eventually, she said, Evans visited her parents. At a tense meeting, he told them that he cared for their daughter, that she was brilliant. He wanted to continue seeing her and play a role in shaping her future, according to Westing and her mother, Sandy Heath.

She considered calling the police and attempting to press charges against Evans, but ultimately decided against it. She said she had worried about her daughter’s mental health and the possibility that she might be bullied for sharing her story publicly in a small town.

Heath and her husband decided to go “the soft way,” she said, and allow the relationship to continue. She’s no longer sure that was the right decision.

“I don’t think we considered the fact that it was such a horrible situation for her to be in,” Heath said.

And Westing’s family found themselves in the middle of that situation in St. Helens, where people were already talking publicly about adult men pursuing romantic relationships with teenage girls. In 1986, two years before Westing said that Evans abused her, St. Helens Fire Chief Donald Armintrout admitted in court to having sexual relations with his foster daughter, but said he had waited until four weeks after she turned 18. A jury acquitted him.

Speaking of Armintrout, the fire district board chairman at the time told The Oregonian, “The biggest problem is he admitted he had an affair… how many others do we want to lay off and fire because of an affair?”

Reflecting on her high school experience, Kittleson said the lines between students and teachers were often blurred.

“Adult males in the school setting were just as equally candidates for being involved with this as my peers,” she said. “I just remember feeling like the lines were crossed often.”

Evans and his wife, Lisa Kaser, divorced in May 1988, court records show. Westing was still a senior in high school at the time. OPB was unable to contact Kaser.

Evans left teaching altogether in July of that year. In his resignation letter, he wrote that it “is the right time to move out of teaching and into another field,” and that he was moving to Eugene.

So was Westing, who turned 18 the August of her first semester at the University of Oregon. Although she had a dorm room, she said she spent most of her free time at Evans' apartment on Patterson Avenue.

Rumors about the relationship flooded St. Helens High School that summer and the following school year. Patrick Brame, who taught ceramics, told OPB by phone he remembers learning that Evans had moved to Eugene with a former student.

“It was like a crushing blow to my chest. It was terrible, I couldn’t believe it,” Brame said.

Westing’s brother, Kevin Goff, is five years younger and said he received calls from girls at the high school later that fall with questions about his sister dating a teacher.

“I asked, ‘How do you know about that?” Goff said. “She says, ‘Everybody knows about it. Teachers, the school knows about it.’”

OPB has found no evidence that anyone attempted to notify law enforcement, despite the widespread rumors. In Oregon, a mandatory reporter failing to report any sexual abuse could be charged with a misdemeanor, with a statute of limitations of two years.

Eventually, Westing said, she left Evans. She said that one of their final conversations took place in front of her parents’ home in St. Helens, where Evans yelled and told her that he had given up everything — his family, career and reputation — for their relationship.

“It was really confusing, because I don’t remember feeling like he gave up anything,” she said. “I felt like I gave up everything.”

A future hope for accountability

Evans became a spokesperson for Sacred Heart Hospital in Eugene in the 1990s, kickstarting a second career in communications.

He later worked for the Oregon Student Assistance Commission from 2000-2002 before switching to the state Department of Education, according to a synopsis of his career posted on government websites. He worked at the education department until 2009, when he joined the Department of Human Services as its communications officer for the Child Welfare and Self Sufficiency Programs.

In 2011, he became the department’s communications director, “responsible for all internal and external communications for the state agency,” according to a description on the DHS website. He retired in 2017.

OPB asked for comment from the Department of Human Services and the Oregon Department of Education on Evans’ time with the agencies. DHS declined to comment and representatives from ODE did not respond.

It’s been many decades since Westing last saw Evans, but she said the trauma of her experience as a 17-year-old remains. She still has nightmares about Evans and he remains an uncomfortable topic for her family — Westing said she’s still grappling with the lack of action by her parents.

The recent arrests have also been emotional for Westing, who says it seems little has changed in the district’s response to claims of abuse since she was a student.

But she said she’s heartened by the community response — the protests, the packed town hall meetings and the signs all over town that read “We Stand with SHHS Students.” She’s hopeful there can be accountability for future students.

“Any person, administration, or even teacher who didn’t say or press into it — I fully hold them responsible,” Westing said. “I don’t know if it would have changed my experience, but it might have.

“It might have changed some experiences for others down the line.”

OPB’s Lauren Dake contributed to this story’s reporting.

Editor’s note: If you’d like to discuss your or your loved one’s experience of abuse in the St. Helens School District, you can securely reach Joni Auden Land by email at jal@opb.org or on Signal @JoniLandOPB.23.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/03/24/former-students-st-helens-teacher-sexual-abuse-school-district-1980s-investigation/