SAN JOSE (CA)
The Mercury News [San Jose CA]
August 20, 2025
By Alex Riggins, The San Diego Union-Tribune
New allegation against Ryan Bennett Segura came during detention hearing in which federal judge ordered him to remain jailed
UPDATED: August 20, 2025 at 5:40 AM PDT
A St. Augustine High School teacher arrested last week on suspicion of distributing images of child sexual abuse also admitted to investigators that he took “non-sexual” photographs of his students and later “aroused himself” to those photos and shared them with another man with whom he was engaged in a sexually explicit online relationship, a prosecutor argued to a judge Tuesday in San Diego federal court.
After hearing that allegation and other allegations of troubling online sexual conduct, U.S. Magistrate Judge Valerie Torres ordered 27-year-old Ryan Bennett Segura to remain in custody without bail. Segura has been in custody since his Aug. 12 arrest.
Segura’s attorney had argued that his client could safely be released on bail with a GPS tracker to live with his grandmother in Fallbrook, where he would be isolated and without his phone and other internet-connected devices that federal agents seized last week when they arrested him and searched his residence.
But Torres sided with the prosecutor, who argued that Segura was a danger to the community and should remain jailed pending trial.
“The new revelations against Mr. Segura are very disturbing,” Ed Hearn, president of St. Augustine, a private all-boys Catholic high school in North Park, said in a statement Tuesday.
“As our Saints family continues to process this shocking development, our focus is on the safety and well-being of our boys,” Hearn said. “Every Saintsman has been offered counseling, and we have made ourselves available to their families. We are also continuing to cooperate fully with the authorities, and we have launched the process of conducting a formal investigation to fully understand what happened and how we can help the Saints Community move forward.”
Hearn said in a statement last week that school officials, upon learning of Segura’s arrest, had immediately placed him on administrative leave.
Segura grew up in the San Diego area and graduated in 2016 from St. Augustine, according to the school’s statement and his defense attorney, Nicholas DePento. Segura attended a Jesuit Catholic university out of state before returning to San Diego to teach.
DePento said Segura taught history and religion at a Catholic middle school in 2020, then joined St. Augustine’s staff in 2021. The defense attorney argued during Tuesday’s detention hearing that the government “will not find one student” with whom Segura had an inappropriate physical or online relationship.
According to an FBI agent’s probable cause statement, the investigation of Segura began last September with the arrest of another man in the Denver area. That man allegedly told FBI agents that he was sexually abusing a 3-year-old child and sharing images of that abuse online.
FBI agents seized that man’s phone and discovered he was communicating “with numerous individuals who expressed a sexual interest in children,” according to the criminal complaint. The FBI allegedly identified one of those individuals as Segura.
The complaint alleged that messages between Segura and the Colorado man showed them “discussing their mutual sexual interest in children, and exchanging visual depictions of minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct.”
Assistant U.S. Attorney Mandy Griffith said Tuesday that Segura’s relationship with that man went beyond just sharing images of child sexual abuse, and that Segura actually requested and directed the Colorado man to perform specific sexual acts on the child.
Griffith also briefly outlined two other sexually explicit online relationships that Segura was allegedly involved in. She said one was with a 16-year-old child, though she gave few other details about that relationship.
A third online relationship, Griffith told the judge, involved a man from out of state who has a “public-facing job.” Griffith, who declined to comment after the hearing, did not identify the man by his name or job. She said he and Segura exchanged sexually explicit images of themselves, which she noted was not illegal.
However, Griffith said Segura and the man also exchanged images of child sexual abuse material and that Segura shared with the man the photos that he took of his students.
DePento, the defense attorney, told the judge he has yet to see all the evidence against his client, but he believed there “must have been something that triggered” Segura’s actions. He also argued that “a woman in this town took advantage of” Segura when he was a minor.
If convicted on the single count with which he’s currently charged, Segura faces a minimum of five years and a maximum of 20 years in prison.
By Alex Riggins | alex.riggins@sduniontribune.com | The San Diego Union-Tribune
Originally Published: August 20, 2025 at 5:23 AM PDT