New claims against NYC teacher accused of suffocating third grader after $18M sex abuse verdict

Disturbing new claims of how a New York City public school teacher silenced and abused a third-grade student decades ago have emerged — a week after a jury awarded the victim a staggering $18 million verdict.The victim’s lawyer detailed the sickening way the now-dead teacher held the poor child’s mouth closed while he molested him for 30 minutes inside an auditorium full of his classmates.“He’s never come out of the auditorium,” the victim’s attorney Jeff Herman told The Post in an exclusive interview.“It took away a future for him — he always wanted to be ordinary and he struggled.” The delayed justice come nearly five decades after parents boycotted the school for covering up the teacher’s sickening acts, court records show, and years after the sicko teacher passed away.The courthouse win for the victim, who was then a third-grader and is only known as A.P.

in court docs, marks a historic milestone as the first lawsuit under 2019’s Child Victims Act to reach a jury verdict.“This result is a historic acknowledgment that survivors deserve justice,” Herman said.In the early 1970s, music teacher John Clark fondled multiple young boys during class movies in the P.S.15 auditorium in Red Hook, according to the 2021 Kings County Supreme Court lawsuit. For A.P., a resident of the Red Hook Houses, that meant being forced by Clark to sit on his lap in the darkened room while he was forcibly assaulted on two occasions, the suit states.During one of the sickening assaults, Clark violated the 10-year-old with his finger for 30 minutes — and when he tried to cry out and scream, Clark put his hand over his mouth to silence him and continued molesting him, said Herman. “While he was being molested, he tried to cry out and scream, and Clark put his hand over his mouth,” Herman said, “and sort of suffocated him for a half hour…it really broke him.”As Herman’s firm investigated the case, it discovered parents had been so outraged by the ...