Catholic School Teacher Charged with Molesting Student

By Tina Moore
New York Post
January 16, 2017

http://nypost.com/2017/01/16/catholic-school-teacher-charged-with-molesting-student/

A 69-year-old Catholic school music teacher was arrested for sexually abusing a girl while giving her singing and piano lessons at her Queens home when she was 11 and 12 years old, police sources said.

Rafael Diaz, music director for the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary Parish, was arrested Saturday and charged with sex abuse and endangering the welfare of a child.

The girl, now 15, told investigators Diaz would touch her diaphragm with four fingers and then fondle her breast with his hands over her clothes while making her sing different pitches, the police sources said.

He once asked her if she had started her menstrual cycle and then allegedly put his hand on her private parts over her clothing. The assaults happened four or five times in the girl’s former home between May and June in 2014, the sources said.

About two weeks after the last incident, the girl told her mom she wanted to get out of the choir and quit music lessons without explanation, the sources said.

The girl saw him about two weeks later on a train platform, where he apologized to her and asked her to come back to the choir. She was upset when she got home after school and told her father everything. He went to the school and complained. Officials there called cops.