She had been to church with him, she said.

“It was clear that he had really put a lot of notions into her head.”įor her part, Elizabeth said that, like many students, she looked to Cummins as a counselor. “He convinced her that he had been a secret agent and … that he had all kinds of money,” her father told HLN. He told her stories about what he said was his past as a CIA and FBI agent flush with cash, her father said. The school district said in a February 8 internal memo, provided to CNN by Whatley, that the student had been removed from Cummins’ forensics class and that assertions she remained in his class were false.Ĭummins was suspended from his job February 6, and he was fired more than a month later - the day after he disappeared with his student.Īuthorities believe the teacher groomed Elizabeth for nearly a year. Cummins,” Anthony Thomas’ attorney, Jason Whatley, wrote in a letter to the school February 6. Cummins has continued in light of these allegations, I can tell you that my client will use whatever legal means are at his disposal, including filing suit, to assist Maury County Schools in protecting (his daughter) from Mr. “If it is true that contact between this student and Mr. Meanwhile, his daughter said she was still in Cummins’ class. Culleoka Unit School learned about the incident the following day, January 24, but the girl’s father didn’t find out until a week later when the Maury County Sheriff’s Department notified him, his attorney said. Many questions remain about what happened: Where were they from the time they left Culleoka in mid-March until they were found Thursday in the tiny town of Cecilville? What were their plans? And did the student leave willingly with her teacher, who had already been warned to stay away from her?Ĭummins and Elizabeth Thomas disappeared March 13, about two months after another student reported seeing the two kissing in his classroom. The exact path that Cummins and his student took from Tennessee to California isn’t clear, but the teacher’s next trip is: At some point, he’ll be extradited to the Volunteer State to face charges of aggravated kidnapping and sexual contact with a minor, among other counts. “I’m glad this is over,” the teacher told sheriff’s deputies when they took him into custody. The arrest of Cummins, 50, and the recovery of the 15-year-old girl came Thursday after the cabin’s caretaker alerted authorities. There, relatives of the teenager fielded dozens of media inquiries, while authorities plastered the airwaves and the Internet with surveillance images of the pair at a store in Oklahoma, asking for the public’s help in finding them. He said their house had burned down in Colorado, and he was down to his last dollar.īut Tad Cummins failed to mention that he was the subject of a nationwide manhunt and that his companion, 15, had been his student, listed in an Amber Alert as abducted and in danger.ĭuring the five weeks the teacher and student were missing, residents tied green ribbons on trees back in Culleoka, Tennessee. The man told people the young woman with him was his wife.

They traveled about as far away from Tennessee as they could get in the US, finally settling - at least for a night - in a remote cabin on a tree-covered mountainside in Northern California. Please look at the time stamp on the story to see when it was last updated.ĬECILVILLE, Calif. This is an archived article and the information in the article may be outdated.

Tad cummins arrested in california