Pornographic images of an underage Redlands High School student, seized from teacher Kevin Kirkland, were never examined by police before prosecutors negotiated a plea deal that allowed him to go free the day he was sentenced for sexually abusing four students, the Southern California News Group has learned.

The evidence — 16 images of one of Kirkland’s victims and another 169 images of him nude — was extracted from the former teacher’s cellphone and computer tablet. It was examined by San Bernardino County sheriff’s crime analysts and turned over to the Redlands Police Department.

But once there, the materials were checked into a police evidence room and sat for months — never to be reviewed by Redlands detectives for possible additional charges against the special education teacher and golf coach.

“They seized his electronic devices. They issued search warrants. They took his computer, his phone, his tablet — they took it all,” said Irvine attorney Morgan Stewart, who is representing some of Kirkland’s victims in civil suits against the Redlands Unified School District. “They had (the evidence) for months. They just didn’t do anything about it.

“No one ever looked at the evidence,” Stewart said. “I was so mad.”

Stewart’s firm has been embroiled in litigation with the Redlands Unified School District since 2014, when it sued on behalf of a victim of former Citrus Valley High School teacher Laura Whitehurst, whose child she bore. It resulted in a $6 million settlement in August 2016. Stewart accused the district of obstructing the police investigation, destroying evidence, and failing to report Whitehurst to police despite repeated complaints and suspicions about her dating back more than six years.

The latest revelations about the Kirkland case were contained in more than 2,000 pages of police reports, affidavits and depositions obtained by the Southern California News Group regarding sex abuse and alleged lewd conduct by Redlands Unified School District faculty spanning more than two decades.

‘Dropped the ball’

The Redlands Police Department acknowledges it dropped the ball on the Kirkland evidence, not finding it until Stewart demanded it as part of his case preparation.

“Morgan Stewart is correct that this evidence had been overlooked until it was discovered as a result of (his) subpoena,” Police Department spokesman Carl Baker said in an email.

The problem, Baker explained, was that the lead detective on the case — Kelli Bishop — was out on medical leave at the time.

It was Bishop who largely put together the case against Kirkland, discovering multiple instances of suspected sexual abuse and inappropriate conduct dating back to 2004, when he was a vice principal at Clement Middle School in Redlands.

According to Stewart’s lawsuit, Kirkland built relationships with students by providing incentives such as treats and toys, books and perfume; allowed students to use his classroom for lunch; drove students off campus for treats; and shared “sexually laden texts with students asking for nude pictures of the students via text.”

Indeed, the nude photos found on his electronic devices were images that had been sent back and forth with the 17-year-old special ed student via text messaging.

Redlands Community Services Officer Julie Salcido notified Bishop on Dec.19, 2016, that she had picked up the evidence — a CD of the pornographic images and an inventory of the materials analyzed — from the sheriff’s crime lab and locked it in the Police Department’s annex lab.

But Bishop was gone already by December, having submitted her case to the District Attorney’s Office in August 2016 and then going out on medical leave due to an injury she suffered, Baker said. So the evidence sat unnoticed and was never handed over to the District Attorney’s Office.

Detective was expected back

Bishop was expected to continue with the investigation when she returned to work, but she never did.

“Since the department anticipated that she would return to duty and the primary case had already been filed, there was no reason to reassign the case at the time,” Baker said.

It was unclear if Bishop, upon learning of the evidence from Salcido, informed Travis Martinez, then a lieutenant overseeing the Kirkland investigation and now the assistant chief of police, or Detective Leslie Martinez, who assisted in the initial investigation. Baker would not disclose that information.

“We have already acknowledged that there was a lack of communication within (Redlands Police Department) that delayed the timely review of this additional evidence,” Baker said. “We are not going to single out individual personnel in the press. We did not anticipate that the lead investigator’s medical leave would be long-term or that it would ultimately result in her retirement.

“The case had already been thoroughly investigated, charges filed, an arrest warrant issued and the suspect taken into custody before the additional electronic evidence was located in (Kirkland’s) possession.”

Plea taken in April 2017

On April 13, 2017 — four months after the CD was locked away and the same month that Bishop medically retired — Kirkland, 59, entered into a plea agreement with the District Attorney’s Office. The former Rancho Cucamonga resident, who according to Stewart now lives in Arizona, agreed to plead guilty to eight felonies and three misdemeanors for sexually abusing four female students from June 2014 through May 2016.

Two months later, Kirkland was sentenced to two years in jail, but was granted credit for time served since his May 2016 arrest in Arizona, where he has family living. As a result, he was released from custody the same day, having served 13 months behind bars.

Lawyer urges new charges

When Stewart learned about the additional evidence against Kirkland, he pressed Redlands police to follow up on it with the possibility of filing additional charges.

Detective Martinez picked up the investigation, presenting the new reports and evidence to the District Attorney’s Office last September. She recommended that Kirkland be charged with two felony counts of possession of child pornography, each of which carries a maximum sentence of one year in jail.

The District Attorney’s Office, however, declined to prosecute Kirkland a second time.

“While the mention of photographs being sent by the victim to the defendant was made in the initial police reports, they were not located and provided or submitted to our office for review until after the defendant had already plea ded guilty and was being sentenced to state prison” and required to register as a sex offender for life,Assistant District Attorney Mary Ashley said in an email. “This would create a Kellett issue given it involved the same victim and course of conduct.”

A Kellett issue prevents a defendant from being charged with any offense arising from a crime that has already been prosecuted.

Additionally, Martinez sought advice on other electronic devices belonging to Kirkland — laptop and desktop computers, two thumb drives and another cellphone — that the sheriff’s crime lab had in its possession but never analyzed. Part of Kirkland’s method of grooming his victims was obtaining their cellphone numbers and texting them repeatedly, complimenting them on their looks and inviting them to his home for barbecues and swimming when his wife was out of town.

In a Sept. 4, 2017, report, the detective said she emailed Deputy District Attorney Jeanetta Ringhofer, who prosecuted Kirkland, and “she told me the (electronic) items no longer needed to be analyzed because Kirkland took a plea.”

Federal prosecution an option?

Laurie L. Levenson, a criminal law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, said prosecutors had another legal option if additional evidence against Kirkland was discovered post-conviction. Under the separate sovereigns doctrine, she said, a criminal defendant already prosecuted by a state court can be prosecuted as well in federal court.

If the San Bernardino County prosecutors “don’t have time or interest to look at evidence themselves, it can be sent over to the feds,” Levenson said.

Stewart believes Kirkland deserved more time in custody, and that the additional evidence was a missed opportunity to achieve that.

“It’s disappointing when a serial pedophile receives such a short sentence in comparison to his crimes against children,” Stewart said. “The fact that I believe they could have sought more time but stopped the investigation at the time of the plea is a question that deserves an explanation.”

In response, Baker said that “had the evidence of child pornography been considered at the time, in the context of the much more serious charges of molestation already presented, it would not likely have made a substantive difference to the criminal case, adding months, at most, to Kirkland’s sentence.”

“This is made clear,” he said, “by the fact that when the evidence was reviewed and the case ultimately presented in September 2017, the District Attorney’s Office declined to file charges.”