Leo Bennet-Cauchon, who has worked with special needs kids in Manteca, California for 16 years, has been on paid leave since February 3. His crime? Hugging a student who asked to be hugged.
Police say they’re concerned “there could be multiple victims.”
“I’ve been trained, if a student asks for a hug, you give a hug,” Bennett-Cauchon told local television station KXTV. “I admit completely that I hugged him and let him sit in my lap when he said ‘sit.’ I picked him up when he said ‘up.’ This is a child that needs that physical contact.”
“He has my full support,” Sharon Anaya, the child’s mother, told the Manteca Bulletin. “That’s why I felt that this should have remained at a school district level investigation, rather than involving police.”
Anaya told the paper Bennett-Cauchon has been working with her son, Giovanni, for three years. She says she’ll sue the school if the "situation… threatening her son's ‘well-being is not resolved quickly.’”
Bennett-Cauchon has been holding a vigil, which has now become a hunger strike, outside of the school’s administrative building, since February 16.
The school has turned the investigation over to local law enforcement, who are attempting to discern whether there were “repeated acts of inappropriate behavior.”
Bennett-Cauchon admitted to KXTV that he gives his students some physical contact, as many of the children he teachers come from homeless families or are in foster homes, and that kids with rough backgrounds sometimes “need a hug.”
Clark Burke, a representative for the school district, says the district is making sure it follows through with both its legal and moral obligations to protect students.