A state appeals court panel Friday upheld a former Long Beach teacher’s conviction on sex-related charges involving three victims, including two former students.
The three-justice panel from California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal rejected Mark Anthony Santo’s contention that the trial court should not have allowed testimony about alleged improper touching of two other female high school students and inappropriate social media communications with students.
“We are unpersuaded by defendant’s argument that the other acts evidence admitted at his trial was too dissimilar from the charged offenses to be probative,” the panel noted in its 18-page ruling. “All of the conduct (charged and uncharged) involved females who were decades younger than defendant. In addition, defendant was in a position of authority over each victim: he was the current or former teacher, or trusted father figure, for all of them before the abuse.”
Santo — who taught at Lindbergh Middle School and Jordan High School — was convicted in June 2023 of two counts of lewd act on a child under 14 and one count each of forcible sexual penetration, forcible oral copulation, assault with intent to commit forcible oral copulation and assault with intent to commit forcible penetration — the latter two of which were vacated because they involved the same conduct as the more serious charges.
Shortly before sentencing Santo to 80 years to life in October 2023, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Laura Laesecke told the defendant, “You are a predator … You are a danger to the community.”
The judge noted that the prosecution had offered Santo a plea deal carrying a 24-year prison sentence at one point and that she initially thought it was “maybe a bit high,” but she realized after hearing the evidence during the trial that it was “not enough.”
“ … You forced these young women to relive that behavior … the molestations, the intimate details of what you did to them,” the judge said at Santo’s sentencing, disputing the defendant’s insistence that he was a beloved teacher who had been wrongly accused.
The judge — who denied Santo’s motion for a new trial — said she thought it was “quite cowardly” for Santo to ask to leave the Long Beach courtroom as the three young women were set to give their victim impact statements. He was brought back into the Long Beach courtroom for the judge to impose the sentence.
One of the victims also called Santo a predator, saying what happened has “had a lifelong impact on me.”
“He made his own family think that an 11-year-old girl is a whore instead of a victim … I was a child,” she said, telling the judge that Santo needs to be in prison “forever.”
Another of the victims said that part of her wants to talk with Santo and protect him, and that she wished he had not decided to leave the courtroom as she and the other victims spoke.
“I wish I could say he has no power over me, but he really does,” she said, while at another point calling him “a predator” and “a weirdo” and saying she knew she had to say something.
A third young woman said she doesn’t think Santo realizes the impact of his actions. She said she was glad that she and the other victims were “able to get justice.”
Santo, now 56, was initially charged in May 2020 with committing a lewd act at his home in La Mirada in 2015 with a 13-year-old girl who was a family friend. The District Attorney’s Office subsequently added charges involving the other two victims.
The appellate court opinion noted that one of his middle-school history students reported he had gotten on a couch where she was resting in a small room at the back of his classroom and was “cuddling” her from behind and spooning her during the 2012-13 school year. The opinion also stated that a young woman who first met Santo when he was her seventh-grade history teacher — and who grew to regard him as a “parent figure” — reported being sexually assaulted by him years later.
The alleged uncharged acts involved two students from Jordan High School, where he had taught for nearly four years and acted as the school’s athletic director, according to the appellate court panel’s ruling.
The Long Beach Unified School District reprimanded Santo for inappropriate conduct with students as early as 2013, but he was allowed to keep working there for years until he struck a deal with the district to quietly resign in 2018 after he admitted to having sexual contact with a former student, according to records obtained by the Long Beach Post. After inking that agreement, Santo was able to get a new job teaching adult students with developmental disabilities at a nearby community college before his arrest in 2020.
Santo testified in his own defense and denied any wrongdoing. He contended that the sexual contact with the woman was consensual and occurred only after she turned 18.
He was ordered to be taken into custody after the jury’s verdict and has remained behind bars since then.
The judge noted at Santo’s sentencing that he will be required to register as a sex offender if he is ever paroled from state prison.
Staff writer Jeremiah Dobruck contributed to this report.