Former students say a teacher at St. Helens High School abused them in the 1980s

A once popular teacher at St. Helens High School pivoted his career to communications, becoming a spokesperson for the Oregon Department of Education and the Department of Human Services. In now-public allegations, two former students say Gene Evans sexually abused them when he was a teacher. OPB reporter Joni Auden Land joins us to lay out the investigation.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is “Think Out Loud.” I’m Dave Miller. We turn now to allegations of sexual abuse at St. Helen’s School District. Late last year, two teachers at the district were charged with sexually abusing multiple students. Soon after, top law enforcement officials in Columbia County said that district leaders had received allegations that the two teachers abused students over a period of several years but failed to share that information with authorities. The high school principal now faces criminal charges as a result, and the superintendent resigned.

All of that followed an earlier case. In 2019, coach and teacher Kyle Wroblewski, who’d been the subject of complaints of inappropriate behavior from students and colleagues for years, pleaded guilty to five counts of sexual abuse. But a new investigation by OPB has found that this culture of non-reporting could go back much further.

Joni Auden Land has been digging into allegations of sexual abuse from the mid to late 1980s. They involve a former teacher named Gene Evans, who went on to become the spokesperson for the Oregon Department of Education and the Department of Human Services, state agencies that are responsible for the well-being of some of the most vulnerable Oregonians.

I talked to Joni about this recently. I started by asking when Joni first heard from Jodie Westing, who graduated from St. Helen’s High School in 1988.

Joni Auden Land: I first heard from Jodie late November, just as protests were kicking off in St. Helen’s about two teachers who have been recently arrested for allegedly sexually abusing students. And she mostly reached out to say, “Hey, I heard about your story, and I want to let you know that I had a similar experience when I was attending school in the 1980s.”

In talking to her, she revealed that the person who allegedly abused her was Gene Evans, someone who had worked at the Department of Human Services, Oregon Department of Education, someone who, if you were a journalist covering those agencies back in the mid-2000s to mid-2010s, you would have known him or come across his name for sure.

Miller: What did you hear from Jodie Westing and her family and friends about what she was like in high school?

Auden Land: Her friends and her family described her as this straight-A student who was very well behaved, and definitely a very good student and a very respectful person. But she was also telling me that she felt very isolated at times, kind of out of place in this small Oregon mill town, and wanting to get out and experience new things, definitely didn’t always fit in with the culture of the place she was living in.

Miller: Gene Evans was, by all accounts, a popular teacher at the time. What did you hear about him?

Auden Land: I know students from back then all described how he had this cult following around him, like kids would come to his classroom during lunch and after school, and just hang out. All the kids really felt like he understood them in a way that other teachers did not. He dressed cooler, or more like them: fitted black jeans, leather jackets. He would listen to the same music that they listened to, talk about it and play guitar in his class, and all the students felt like he was someone they could relate to more, compared to all the other teachers they had.

Miller: Were there suspicions among students or staff about his behavior towards students?

Auden Land: That’s hard to say. I know for a fact that when it came to the relationship Jodie said she had with him, her and her close group of friends all knew. It was something they all talked about. And in fact, they all hung out with Jodie and Gene together in various social settings around town, going to concerts in Portland. There was at least one teacher who did know, or says he knew, and then says he told a principal. But it’s unclear how widespread it was known. It seems like it was more known once Gene left the district, potentially.

Miller: What did you hear from Jodie Westing about when things started to cross a line?

Auden Land: When they first started talking, Jodie had him as an economics teacher, and it started as leaving little notes, kind of complimentary. And it changed pretty quickly from what she says into a more romantic setting, where it was less about class and more about, “Hey, you look really nice today. Hey, I think you’re really special. I think you’re amazing.” And that quickly progressed into buying gifts.

Jodie Westing [recording]: I think he had a vision of how maybe I could dress or look cool, so he would give me some of his t-shirts. I remember I had a bright yellow Interview magazine t-shirt of his that he gave me. And my mom said, “Where’d you get that?” … “Oh, it’s Janelle’s” … just lying. Yeah, he kind of wanted the cool girl look.

Auden Land: As you can hear, she says it went from him buying her gifts into trying to influence her behavior and her style and trying to mold her into a certain way – that’s definitely how she sees it. And that progressed into … he would pick her up and they would go driving around St. Helen’s together, started with holding hands, kissing. She says the first time they did anything remotely sexual was on a trip to the coast. She said she was going with friends, but he was helping organize that. They stayed in a motel and that’s where they had sex for the first time.

Miller: And this is when she was 17?

Auden Land: This is when she was 17. She didn’t turn 18 until the August after she graduated high school.

Miller: You talked to another former student who says that Evans groped her, and several other students who say that they felt Evans’s behavior toward them was inappropriate. What did you hear?

Auden Land: I heard a lot of similar things to what Jodie was saying, in terms of a pattern of grooming, of him paying special attention to you, writing notes. Maybe he’ll lightly touch on the shoulders, kind of play around, maybe it felt like it didn’t cross the line. But it would progress into buying gifts and calling students out of class during his break periods to hang out in his classroom alone, get them by themselves, allegedly. But none of them, as far as I know, progressed to the level that Jodie is describing where it’s a full-fledged relationship, basically.

Miller: Did anyone report their concerns about Evans’s behavior?

Auden Land: Yeah, there was a track coach named Gerry Tinkle, and during that trip to the coast that I was talking about, he saw Evans and Jodie on the beach, holding hands. I talked to him for the story. He remembers seeing them and the weird feeling that gave him inside, and how he had maybe suspected something was going on because Jodie’s on his track team, and all of a sudden, he sees Gene hanging out more around her than you might have normally expected.

He reported it to the principal, Zan Freeburn, at the time, and says he didn’t follow up. It is unclear if that actually went anywhere. And at St. Helens School District, they say they have no record that any complaint or report was made about Evans.

Miller: So there’s no evidence that the administration did anything after being alerted?

Auden Land: No, and to be fair, there’s no evidence besides Gerry Tinkle saying that he went there. But no, there’s no written documentation about any actions that occurred afterwards.

Miller: You tried to contact Evans about this story. What happened?

Auden Land: Me and my reporting colleague, Lauren Dake, went to his house and knocked on his door, explained the story we’re working on, and he declined to speak to us. We’ve sent him letters trying to explain, give him the opportunity to speak, and he has declined to comment on our story.

Miller: Evans and his wife got divorced in 1988. Soon after that, he left the St. Helen’s School District. He left teaching altogether. He moved to Eugene, where Jodie Westing was a freshman at the U of O. How did Westing’s parents respond to all of this?

Auden Land: That’s interesting. I think they found out in May, before graduation, basically, and they found out because someone had called their home, leaving some sort of robotic message saying that Jodie was seeing Mr. Evans … and it all blew up from there. He, according to Jodie and her mom, came to their home and attempted to explain that, yes, he was having a relationship with their daughter, but he loved her and respected her, and wanted to continue seeing her to help her grow into the best person she could be.

Miller: And at this point, I mean, this is an important thing – she was 17 and he was in his early 30s.

Auden Land: Thirty-one, I think, yeah.

Miller: What did her parents do?

Auden Land: Her parents … I talked to her mom, and she described feeling very weird about it, and mulling her options, potentially calling the police, filing a report. But she was really scared about the impact that would have on her daughter’s mental health. In particular, she was afraid that if this got public, the backlash in this small Oregon town would be too much, the damage would be too great. So they elected to take the soft way, as she put it, and not report it, and just let it be.

So she described how, for the next year or so that they were together, he kind of became part of the family, would attend family functions, dinners, just like a normal boyfriend would – except, of course, he was her former teacher.

Miller: What did you hear from Jodie Westing about what it meant that her parents, when confronted with this, didn’t stop it?

Auden Land: Looking back now, she definitely has very conflicted feelings about this. She definitely feels that it’s still something they don’t talk about very much, from what I understand. I mean, I think they’ve started to talk about it and then go over what happened. But I was showing her the quotes that her mom said in her story in regards to this, and I remember her being surprised that, “Wow, she’s never said that to me.”

And basically, what her mom said was that, “I don’t think we considered what a horrible situation this was for her,” to be in a relationship with an adult, with her teacher, while she was still underaged.

Miller: But you got those quotes from her mom before her mom, it seems, had said something like that to her.

Auden Land: Yes … or that during all conversations they have had the past few years about this, she’s never heard her mom say anything like that.

Miller: Evans went on to become a spokesperson, as you noted, for the Oregon Department of Human Services and then for Oregon Department of Education, as well. What do you think about that, in the context of everything we’ve been talking about?

Auden Land: It’s definitely interesting, because if he had been reported at the time, if someone were to call the police or if he had been fired, if this had been on his record in some way, it’s hard to believe that he would have risen to those positions; and not just having a job within these departments, but being the face for this entire department whose mission it is to protect children and vulnerable adults in Oregon.

Miller: Literally the welfare of often very vulnerable young people, or their education.

Auden Land: Exactly.

Miller: What did Jodie Westing say about the lasting impact of all of this?

Auden Land: She told me that it was this thing that kept quiet inside of her for a long time. And it wasn’t until about 2014, when she heard Gene talking on the radio on OPB in his position as DHS spokesperson, it really hit her that’s something that she really needed to confront.

I think she talked about how she still has nightmares about him. I think she said it informed her modern relationships, or relationships she’s had since then. She also talked about her own experience with her own kids, and how that’s given her new perspective about her relationship with Gene.

Westing [recording]: Well, having a daughter who’s 20, who’s in college right now, just the loss, grief and regret that I didn’t have those experiences. I didn’t have the friends, I didn’t have that whole piece. That whole time in my life was just so weird and secret. It became this scar tissue, and it was all about him.

Miller: Did investigating this story give you any perspective on more recent allegations of abuse in St. Helen’s or a 2019 criminal conviction there?

Auden Land: Definitely. I remember the first day I went to St. Helen’s to cover the protest at the high school, and one thing I heard consistently from almost every adult that I talked to was, “This has been going on since I was a student here and I’m glad that this is finally being taken seriously.” That struck me for sure, because that was before I knew about Gene or any other teachers that have been arrested for allegedly abusing kids at the school over the years. For example, I did talk to a parent named Jenae Brinster at the protest, who summarized all those feelings.

Jenae Brinster [recording]: Anger, heartbreak, disappointment. Once again, I was an alumni. I graduated in 2003 and now my own children are going here. I’ve watched this for the last however many years. I’ve seen it when I was a teenager here and it’s got to stop.

Auden Land [recording]: The same kind of thing was happening when you were a student here?

Brinster [recording]: I was here when Wroblewski was here.

Auden Land: She’s talking about Kyle Wroblewski, who was a teacher at St. Helen’s, who was convicted for abusing students in 2019 as well, which did result in, I think, less than a year ago, the largest settlement for a sexual abuse case in Oregon history of $3.5 million.

It was striking how uniform that response was, actually. And to put an experience to that, being Jodie’s, I think it made the response, the protests, the packed town halls, make more sense, that it’s these kinds of experiences that are informing that anger.

Miller: Joni, thanks very much.

Auden Land: Thank you, Dave.

Miller: That was Joni Auden Land, a reporter for OPB. We talked on Friday.

Early this morning, Joni got an emailed statement from Gene Evans. I’ll read it in its entirety.

[Reading email statement from Gene Evans]: “These are stories and allegations from nearly 40 years ago. I have never been questioned, investigated or charged with any wrongdoing like this during my years as a teacher or anytime since.”

Contact “Think Out Loud®”

If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983. The call-in phone number during the noon hour is 888-665-5865.