Not guilty — and not the same

Jose Bernardo Fanjul is sitting with his wife, Angela. It's been more than two weeks now since the West High School teacher was acquitted of sexual abuse charges made by a former student, and he is trying his mightiest to leave behind what he describes as "ten months of hell" and instead look ahead.

It is not easy. The euphoria of being found "not guilty" inevitably morphs into the realization that like it or not, the ordeal will leave a mark.

Things will not — cannot — be the same. Some people will continue to think you're guilty, no matter what the justice system said. Others might see you as vulnerable, an easy target, now that your face has been on the news for nearly a year with "charged with sexual abuse" under the picture.

Fanjul sighs. He wants to talk about his plans for the future, but he can't help but recount the first days of the ordeal last September, when he was handcuffed at school and escorted down the hall to a police car waiting outside, next to a Fox 13 news truck. Bad news travels fast.

He went directly to the Salt Lake County Jail, where Fox 13 already had his picture on the air, bigger than life on the jail TV. "Everybody would look at me and just point," he says. "It was terrifying."

It was then that a glimmer of goodness, West High style, emerged from the gloom.

"I saw some of my students who were in jail," says Fanjul. "Some of them I had failed. They walked over to me and said, 'Don't worry, Fanjul, we have your back.' That's what they said to me."

He shakes his head at the irony. Students who might have had an ax to grind because he hadn't given them a passing grade say they have his back while another student he thought he was helping has accused him of felonies that could put him behind bars for 150 years.

It's that thought, he confesses, that makes future plans more complicated.

"To have what happened to me," he says. "It only takes one person."

That one person — his accuser — was precisely the kind of student who drove him into teaching in the first place, he insists. A person with problems, with issues, a kid who could use some help — just as he could when he was that age.

"I was one of my students," says the Venezuelan immigrant. "I dropped out of high school, I ran away from home. I know what is needed in the lives of kids like that."

That, he says, is what accounted for his unconventional hands-on teaching style. The kind of teacher who would go to football games and hold up signs that proclaimed "I am (insert name of student) teacher." The kind who got close to his students; some would say inappropriately close.