On a playdate, the 10-year-old girl theorized with two friends about why her favorite third grade teacher was no longer at Severna Park Elementary School.
Did Matthew Schlegel have a kidney stone? Had one of his family members died? Or was he, she wrote on her iPad, a “doctor in disguise”?
“Because he would always touch us,” the girl testified on Wednesday at the Anne Arundel County Courthouse. “We thought that maybe he was a doctor.”
The reason was much darker...
The girl testified for almost 2 1/2 hours as a dog sat near her out of view to help reduce stress. Defense attorneys estimated that they have several more hours of cross-examination, and she will return on Thursday to the witness stand.
She said she’d often sit next to Schlegel, and he started touching her two to three weeks into the school year.
But she said she never told her parents. They later discovered that message she wrote on her iPad.
During cross-examination, Patrick Seidel, one of Schlegel’s attorneys, asked her to provide an example of a true statement.
The girl replied that Schlegel touched her.
Seidel then inquired why she gave that answer.
“Because,” she said, “it’s true.”
Prosecutors, meanwhile, dropped 26 out of the 55 charges against Matthew Schlegel, 45, of Severna Park, who’s standing trial in Anne Arundel County Circuit Court.
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