A former music teacher is facing more than 100 years in jail for sexually abusing young students.
Lawrence Joynes, 56, pleaded guilty Monday in Montgomery County to abusing 14 young students in his classroom at New Hampshire Estates Elementary School in Silver Spring, Maryland. Joynes had been a teacher in Montgomery County Schools for 27 years. Monday he admitted taking sexually explicit videos of children from kindergarten to second grade.
In 2013 Joynes was arrested at his home in Dundalk, Maryland, in a federal investigation into distribution of child pornography.
He served one year in Baltimore County and then was transferred to Montgomery County to face charges there. Investigators discovered that Joynes had sex with a seventh grader at Eastern Middle School in the early 1990s. He hid from his victim in that case by faking his own death, but she later found her former teacher and reported him to police. He faced a second-degree rape charge and Monday pleaded guilty to child sex abuse in that case.
