Former Toronto Private School Director Facing Child-porn Charges in U.S.

By Peter Goffin
Obits for Life
February 22, 2016

http://www.thestar.com/news/crime/2016/02/22/former-toronto-private-school-director-facing-child-porn-charges-in-us.html

Former Leo Baeck Jewish Day School director David Prashker (seen in photo taken from school website in 2008) has now been charged in connection with child-pornography offences in California.

A man who resigned as director of a Toronto private school in 2008 over graphic poems on his website is now facing child-pornography charges in California.

On Monday, the district attorney of Contra Costa County in the San Francisco Bay area charged David Prashker, 60, with possession of child pornography and attempting to destroy evidence.

County investigators went to search Prashker’s home in Lafayette, Calif. on Feb. 18. When they arrived, Prashker allegedly ran to the back of the house and threw a laptop out a second-storey window into the backyard.

The district attorney’s office said that forensic examiners later found evidence of child pornography on the laptop.

Prashker had recently worked as a substitute teacher at two private schools in Contra Costa, the district attorney said. He has also worked at schools in London and Miami.

From 2004 to 2008, Prashker was director of Leo Baeck Jewish Day School, a kindergarten-to-Grade-8 private school with campuses in Thornhill and just west of Forest Hill.

Prashker resigned in March 2008, after six poems he had written and posted to his personal website were circulated to parents in an anonymous email.

The writings contained vivid sexual imagery and profane language, and one piece began with the line “The first act of killing is the hardest” and ended with “the second time is remarkably straightforward.”

Prashker is scheduled to appear in court in Martinez, Calif. on Tuesday morning.