The icky romance may soon be over over for 41-year-old former California high school teacher Christopher James Hooker and 18-year-old Jordan Powers, the former student Hooker left his wife and children to move in with earlier this month — Hooker was arrested Friday on suspicion of abusing a 17-year-old student in 1998.
Hooker was arrested at his home and booked on one count of oral copulation with a minor, after which a judge entered a plea of "not guilty" on Hooker's behalf and set his bail at $50,000. The former high school teacher reached national prominence when he appeared in front of Dr. Phil and the GMA crew, placidly holding hands with the 18-year-old girl he'd shacked up with. Though the couple maintained at the time that their relationship did not become physical until Jordan turned 18, Tammie Powers has sought to prove using a backlog of phone calls and nearly 8,000 text messages that physical contact did occur between Hooker and her daughter while Jordan was still a minor.
At the time of the couple's press abbreviated press junket, it was noted — with what we can now all appreciate as cosmic foreshadowing — that since California's Statutes of Limitations is so broad and its rape laws so strict, Tammie Powers wouldn't have been hard-pressed to help put Hooker behind bars if she had real evidence that he'd engaged in a sexual relationship with Jordan before she turned 18. The Modesto Bee reports that, since Hooker's arrest, Tammie Powers has taken her daughter to an undisclosed location, somewhere hopefully far away (at least for now) from the legal fracas that's about to ensue.
Ex-teacher arrested for sex abuse of minor [CBS News]