6th-grade teacher elopes with student, sentenced

A former math teacher sentenced to federal prison for a sex crime with a minor says the age of the 13-year-old schoolboy she fled with to Mexico didn’t matter to her.

“We didn’t see age anymore. ... In my mind he quit being a teenage boy. ... to me, he was a man,” Kelsey Peterson said in a taped interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America” aired Wednesday.

Peterson, 26, was sentenced Monday to six years in federal prison and five years of supervised release. She also must register as a sex offender. She pleaded guilty in July to a charge of transporting a minor across state lines to have sex.

Peterson was the boy’s sixth-grade math teacher at Lexington Middle School in south-central Nebraska during the 2005-06 school year and started having sex with him in November 2006, according to court documents.

The pair disappeared in October, soon after the district’s superintendent confronted Peterson about allegations of an inappropriate relationship with the boy.

She was arrested a week later in Mexicali, Mexico, after the boy made a cell phone call to his family.

Peterson still faces state charges that include kidnapping, felony child abuse and first-degree sexual assault. Dawson County Attorney Elizabeth Waterman said Monday that her staff will work to get custody of Peterson so she can face those charges.

Peterson said in the ABC interview that she was drawn to the boy, then 12, and thought to herself, “I can change this guy.” She said her actions were wildly out of line with her upbringing in a Christian household.

She had expected to grow up and get married, she said, then have children and live in a house with a picket fence.