My teacher, the predator
A few months ago, I sat in a small gray conference room and listened as four middle-aged men read aloud from my high school diaries. They parsed each line, asking me to explain the technicalities of my teenage abbreviations and cadence, searching for evidence that I had - unknowingly - witnessed a crime.
Joseph Thomas Koetters was my English teacher at the Marlborough School in Los Angeles. In 2015, he was sentenced to a year in jail on charges that he engaged in sex acts with two underage girls in the early 2000s.
Although I was oblivious to my teacher's predations, I knew one of the young women he targeted. Chelsea used to walk around with a half consumed
