On March 22, 2018 Brittany Zamora was arrested in Goodyear, Arizona. A sixth-grade teacher at the time of her arrest, Zamora currently resides at the Arizona Department of Corrections Perryville Complex in Santa Cruz Unit I, where she is serving a twenty-year sentence for sexual molestation of a minor: one of her thirteen-year-old students. Zamora’s grooming and abuse of the victim emerged when the 13-year-old’s mother received a series of alerts from a monitoring app "Sentry Parental Control" she had installed on her son’s cell phone with his knowledge. Zamora and her sixth-grade student had been exchanging flirtatious as well as overtly sexual messages on Instagram and Snapchat, all of which had been saved by the monitoring app — despite Zamora having deleted the messages immediately after sending them. When the victim’s parents confronted their 13-year-old, he told his parents everything. Zamora had performed oral sex on him in her classroom and in her car a total of three times, and they had intercourse on three occasions, at least one time in their classroom — with one of the victim's friends posted as a lookout. Zamora had also shared nude photos with the victim, who had reciprocated. After learning what was going on, the 13-year-old’s parents notified the school principal, who in turn called the police. Zamora was arrested shortly thereafter. On July 12, 2019, Zamora was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Her release date as a sexual offender is currently scheduled for March 16, 2038. After her sentencing hearing, Zamora's attorney suggested that the 13-year-old student was not blameless in their encounters. And, in fact, read without information about relative age and position of authority, the messages exchanged paint an undeniably two-sided picture. Zamora attorney Belen Olmedo Guerra stated, "Brittany is not a predator. This was not between a young child and Brittany. This was a teenager." And his sixth-grade teacher. Context matters.
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