Niskayuna school employee Tyriek Blackmon admits to child pornography

NISKAYUNA — Residents are questioning why it took months for leaders in the Niskayuna Central School District to acknowledge the arrest — and subsequent conviction — of a school employee who shared a video of a child sexually performing.

Schools Superintendent Carl Mummenthey defended the district’s handling of Tyriek “Elise” Blackmon’s spring 2024 arrest and Nov. 26 conviction on charges of promoting a sexual performance of a child.

Mummenthey stressed during a telephone interview Tuesday that the crimes to which Blackmon pleaded guilty did not take place on school grounds and did not involve a student from the district.

The Schenectady County Prosecutor’s Office said investigators were able to identify the child, but never developed enough evidence to identify the person “engaged in sexual activity with the child in the video.” The case was investigated by Schenectady police.

Mummenthey reiterated his points in an email about Blackmon’s case sent earlier Tuesday. It was addressed to the “Niskayuna community.”

While Luke Jefts, who has two children in the district, expressed relief Tuesday that the district had officially released a statement on the matter, he and members of Niskayuna Parents for SRO, vocal advocates for the school district’s police officers, they wondered why it was needed. so long.

“It is unfortunate that the district responded only after parents asked about the incident and several months after the incident occurred,” the group wrote in a statement to the Times Union.

Blackmon, a 30-year-old Schenectady resident, was fired from a job working at the bus garage and high school in late May, the month after his arrest.

Blackmon pleaded guilty in a Schenectady County courtroom to two counts of promoting a sexual performance of a child as a sexually motivated crime stemming from a November 2023 incident, prosecutors said.

Blackmon admitted to sharing a sexually explicit video of a minor child engaging in sexual behavior with another person. At the time, Blackmon was talking to another person on an online dating app. Prosecutors said a good Samaritan alerted police to the incident. Blackmon was also accused of sharing a sexually explicit image.

The plea agreement calls for Blackmon to be sentenced to seven years in prison on January 28. The defendant will also have to register as a sex offender and spend 10 years on parole once the prison term ends.

The child is getting help from Child Protective Services and other social service agencies.

Mummenthey wrote in the email to residents Tuesday that “we understand this news may be upsetting and may raise emotions or questions in our school community,” and urged staff and students to discuss any concerns with building leaders and the district attorney’s office.

The Board of Education, Mummenthey said, approved Blackmon’s termination on May 28. It went into effect the next day.

Asked why the public wasn’t alerted after the board’s action, the superintendent said, “All decisions we make regarding ongoing law enforcement communications are coordinated with our Board of Education attorney. … We are careful not to ever have communication with the wider community impede or interfere with an ongoing investigation.”

Mummenthey pointed out Tuesday that Blackmon was not identified as a school district employee in the Dec. 3 news release sent by the DA’s office about the guilty plea. He said the district only learned of the guilty plea a day or two later.

Assistant U.S. Attorney John Carson, head of the office’s special victims bureau, said, “It didn’t seem, at least to me, that it wasn’t central to the case, we had no evidence in the investigation that the school or the school district had anything to do with the case.”

He said the victim was a “child known to the defendant through personal relationships, nothing related to work” and that the other charge of promoting a sexual performance by a child related to additional images that “appear to be and are known to be images routine. found on the Internet.”

Mummenthey was adamant that the district has fully cooperated with Schenectady police.

“I would drop off at the Schenectady Police Department. I would be very surprised if our conduct was described as anything less than cooperative and accommodating,” he said.

Schenectady police did not respond.

The school district’s first interaction with police in the Blackmon case was in November 2023, Mummenthey said.

He said on April 9, the district learned Blackmon had been arrested.

“Once we were made aware of a guilty plea from this individual, we worked with our communications team and our school board attorney, drafted the appropriate message and sent that message to staff and students,” he said.

“We didn’t see this picked up by the local media, we weren’t alerted by the district attorney that the plea was taken or that the statement was released, and in fact through community members we found out that this was posted on the website- the (district attorney)”.