Suspended Teachers' Aide Indicted on Sexual Abuse Charges

A Howard County Grand Jury Wednesday indicted a 37-year-old Gwynn Oak man on several charges related to accusations that he sexually assaulted students at the Maryland School for the Deaf.

Clarence Cepheus Taylor faces seven counts of sexual abuse of a minor and three counts of soliciting a subject for child porn. He has been suspended from his job as a teachers’ aide at the school, according to Howard County police. 

Taylor was employed as an evening-shift dorm aide at the school between 2008 and 2010 when, according to police, he inappropriately touched female students. 

In early December 2012, police said that one of the girls had reported the alleged incidents to a teacher when she learned that she may not have been the only victim, according to police.

At that time, police reported that three girls said they were touched inappropriately by Taylor while in the dorms on the school's Howard County campus, which sits near the nexus of Ellicott City, Columbia and Elkridge.

Administrators at the Columbia campus of the Maryland School for the Deaf would not comment. A statement in December from the school superintendent's office, at the school's Frederick campus, read:

"This is an ongoing investigation being handled by the Howard County Police, and MSD [Maryland School for the Deaf] is not at liberty to comment about this case."