Court records show that Keshawn Tre’Vyune Belcher, a former substitute teacher in South Mississippi, is now being charged with nine counts of criminal sex crimes in Jackson County. Belcher was first arrested in April 2023 while working as a substitute teacher at Ocean Springs Middle School. He was charged with one count of molestation or touching a kid for sex and one count of child exploitation.
The grand jurors found enough proof to charge Belcher with one count of touching a child for lustful reasons, five counts of child exploitation, and three counts of giving sexually explicit material to minors. Since he was arrested last year, he has been in jail without bond.
Court documents say that Belcher committed the crimes over the course of five days in April 2023. Records show that during that time, Belcher sexually touched a minor student, sent several minor students pictures and videos of himself masturbating while naked, asked one student to have oral sex, and failed in his attempts to get a minor student to record themselves masturbating and send the video back to Belcher.
Ocean Springs police said Belcher talked to kids on Snapchat and sent them crude sexual content and videos of himself.
Belcher was sued by the parents of three minor students in three separate cases. The lawsuits named Belcher, the Ocean Springs School District, and the temporary employment agency Kelly Services, Inc. as defendants. Other defendants who have not been named have since been moved to federal court in Gulfport.
Kelly Services, Inc. is hired by the school board to fill in as substitute teachers at Mississippi Coast schools. Kelly Services hired Belcher to fill in as a teacher at Ocean Springs Middle School. Three kids from Ocean Springs Middle School sued. There was one boy and two girls.
A student who was 13 years old at the time and went to Ocean Springs Middle School said that Belcher held her against her will and abused her after calling her to his classroom to help her with a task. Records show that when the girl got there, Belcher was the only person in the room. He grabbed her face, kissed her, and touched her body inappropriately, making her unable to leave.
The girl told the police that Belcher “held her in his grip,” so she couldn’t run away. The girl got away from Belcher when the school bell rang, briefly distracting him, according to the records. She ran out of the classroom. The girl then told her parents and the school what had happened. In a different case, Belcher is accused of sending inappropriate texts to an Ocean Springs Middle School student who was 12 years old at the time.
After that, he sent her messages on Snapchat and other social media sites asking if he could watch TV with her at her house, but her parents wouldn’t let him.
It was a 14-year-old Ocean Springs Middle School student in the third case where Belcher is accused of sending the boy inappropriate Snapchat texts.
The kids told their parents what happened, and their parents told Ocean Springs police about the claims. In the lawsuits, the parents say that the school system and Kelly Services were careless when hiring, didn’t investigate and prosecute teacher misconduct, and didn’t train and hire qualified people to watch what teachers do.