OMAHA — A former math teacher sentenced to federal prison for a sex crime with a minor says the age of the 13-year-old boy she fled with to Mexico with didn’t matter to her.
“We didn’t see age anymore. . . . In my mind he quit being a teenage boy. . . . To me, he was a man,” Kelsey Peterson said in a taped interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America” aired Wednesday.
Peterson, 26, was sentenced Monday to six years in federal prison and five years of supervised release. She also must register as a sex offender. She pleaded guilty in July to a charge of transporting a minor across state lines to have sex.
Peterson was the boy’s sixth-grade math teacher at Lexington Middle School in Nebraska. The pair disappeared in October. She was arrested a week later in Mexicali, Mexico, after the boy made a cellphone call to his family.
Peterson still faces state charges that include kidnapping, felony child abuse and first-degree sexual assault.
