A Navy veteran and ROTC teacher at a Manhattan high school cheated on his wife with a 17-year-old cadet, and has been suspended without pay and barred from future school work, investigators said Wednesday.
Edward Gunning, 55, a substitute teacher at the High School for Health Careers and Sciences, supervised the teen’s ROTC program and would have sex with her in his home while he wife was at work, according to a report by city Special Commissioner of Investigation Anastasia Coleman.
He and the teen shared explicit text messages, which his wife found, the report alleges.
“I want it all,” Gunning allegedly wrote in one message, and expressed his “love” for oral sex with the teen in another.
His estranged wife, Christine Kelly, told the school’s assistant principal about the affair in December, after becoming suspicious in in early 2018, the report stated. In March 2018, Gunning told his wife he was “no longer attracted to her” and stopped sharing a bed with her, according to the report.
That June, Kelly found a suspicious hairbrush in their bathroom and confronted him about it, and when he didn’t respond, she checked out surveillance footage in their building management office and saw the teen enter the lobby and leave a few hours later.
That video wasn’t available to an SCI investigator, and Kelly said it had been deleted from the camera system’s hard drive after 30 days, the report said.
The teen graduated from the High School for Law and Public Service, which shares a campus with the High School for Health Careers and Sciences, in June. She admitted to the affair, and to exchanging photos and texts with Gunning, but said the relationship ended in July 2018, the report said.
Besides his suspension without pay, Gunning is also ineligible for future work with the city school system, Coleman said.
“Although we cannot criminally refer this matter due to the age of (the cadet) at the time of her sexual relationship with Gunning, any sexual encounter with a student is improper and an egregious abuse of authority as a New York City School teacher,” she said in a statement Wednesday.
Attempts to reach him for comment were unsuccessful.
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