A judge decided Tuesday to keep a St. Augustine High School teacher who was accused by federal prosecutors of disseminating materials about child sexual abuse in custody.
The 27-year-old Ryan Bennett Segura was detained last week on suspicion of exchanging sexually graphic videos of children with an unnamed Denver guy. “Further admitted that he views this type of material every couple of months but claims he stopped doing so in approximately March 2025,” an FBI special agent said in a probable cause statement filed last week, citing Segura’s admission to investigators that he shared child sexual abuse material with the Denver man.
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Previous coverage:
San Diego Catholic high school teacher charged with child sex abuse material possession
St. Augustine teacher charged with distributing child sex abuse material makes 1st court appearance
At a court hearing on Tuesday to decide whether Segura will stay in jail, a prosecutor claimed that Segura also sent a separate guy nonsexual pictures of his students, and that the two men talked about how attracted they were to each other sexually.
According to Amanda Griffith, the assistant U.S. attorney, Segura was a threat to the community as “he has chosen to put himself in a profession that allows him to be around individuals with whom he is sexually attracted.”
She additionally stated that Segura “has breached the promise that he had with the students of the school by violating their trust.” The prosecutor stated that Segura had a “public-facing job in another state,” but he did not name the second individual with whom he was allegedly in contact or clarify whether he was being charged with a crime.
On Tuesday afternoon, St. Augustine President Ed Hearn made the following statement to NBC 7:
The recent disclosures made against Mr. Segura are extremely unsettling. Our boys’ safety and wellbeing are our top priorities as our Saints family works through this heartbreaking situation. We have made ourselves available to their families and offered counseling to all Saintsmen. Additionally, we are still working closely with the authorities, and we have started the formal inquiry process to find out exactly what happened and how we can support the Saints Community going forward.
Nicholas DePento, Segura’s defense lawyer, contended that Segura could be safely sent to his grandmother’s house so that a GPS device could track his whereabouts.
Additionally, he told U.S. Magistrate Judge Valerie Torres that prosecutors would not discover any proof that his client had ever physically harmed any of his students and denied that his client presented any threat to the community.
Segura faces a mandatory minimum penalty of five years in jail and a maximum sentence of twenty years for the distribution of pictures of children involved in sexually explicit behavior.
According to Segura’s LinkedIn profile, he has been employed at St. Augustine since the middle of 2021 and serves as both the head track and field coach and a religion instructor. According to the profile, he was previously employed by the Diocese of San Diego in Vista as a middle school teacher.
Segura will be placed on administrative leave until the criminal investigation and the school’s own probe are finished, Hearn said in a statement last week.
