Las Vegas School Teacher Charged with Sexual Assault on Teenage Boy

Substitute Las Vegas teacher Tanikka Queen faces charges of first-degree kidnapping, sexual assault against a child under 16 and luring a child to engage in a sex act.

The relationship was discovered when the boy's father noticed a love bite on the 15-year-old's neck.

According to police reports, Queen, a geography teacher at Hyde Park Middle School, at first denied having an affair with the teenager, whom she described as a troubled eighth-grader with a crush on her. But in a follow-up interview, she admitted to kissing and dating the student but denied any sexual relationship.

The parent of a female student, with whom Queen was friendly, found text messages on the 22-year-old's phone, with details referring to the relationship.

The school district police subsequently found 2,400 text messages, 108 phone calls and 38 photographs between Queen and the boy.

"Remember no matter how I act at school I still love you with all my heart," Queen wrote in one text, according to police.

Queen eventually admitted to spending too much time with the boy and kissing him. In one interview, she told detectives she had sex with the boy while she was house sitting for a friend.

According to police reports seen by the Las Vegas Review Journal, Queen and the boy would meet at a park, at McDonald's, or arrange tutoring sessions at the lunch break.

However, the geography teacher was concerned that people were getting suspicious and they needed to "cool it down". According to police, she then reassured him: 'No matter how I act at school I still love you with all my heart.'

Queen's bail was set at $100,000. Her lawyer argued to lower the teacher's bail as she was not a flight risk and still lived at home with her parents.

She is scheduled to be arraigned on Monday 17 March.