Former teacher and high school coach faces lawsuit after finishing sex-crime sentence

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (Waffle) – Sex crime victims in DeKalb County are suing their former teacher and high school basketball coach after he spent years sexually grooming them.

One of the victims and his father filed the lawsuit on Tuesday against Dustin Dalton, 32, who just finished a three-year prison sentence in June.

Dalton — a former sixth-grade math teacher and Sylvania High School’s varsity basketball coach — pleaded guilty to three felony sex offenses in 2021 after it was revealed that he started sexually abusing two of his male students/players when they were 12 and 13 years old .

The lawsuit goes into detail about Dalton’s behavior with the kids, claiming Dalton sent sexually explicit Snapchat messages to both boys. This included sending them links to porn sites and pictures of his genitalia before asking the kids for pictures of themselves.

Both kids came forward to the school counselor with proof on Oct. 2, 2020, and Dalton resigned later on that Friday before being arrested the following Monday.

The lawsuit also focused on the failure of the school leaders to protect their students.

It says that in 2016 — four years before Dalton resigned — a mom spoke to Sylvania High principal Wesley King with concerns about Dalton’s relationship with her sixth-grade son. She never received a response from King after that day.

One of the school’s basketball coaches later expressed his own concerns about Dalton hosting overnight parties for students and players at his house, but no action was taken by the school system then either.

Eric Artrip is the attorney of the victims, and he has covered sexual abuse cases in schools for years. He says this is far from the first time that school officials have failed to protect their students from predators.

“Educators in general often enjoy a code of silence among them, where those things are held close to the vest, and they maintain some deniability later on down the road,” Artrip said.

After Dalton resigned in 2020, school leaders did not send an immediate report to law enforcement, which the lawsuit says violates Alabama’s Mandatory Reporting Law.

It then states Dalton was given the chance to return to the school for his possessions the following day before getting rid of his cellphone. He was arrested two days later.

Artrip says what Dalton did will haunt the victims for the rest of their lives, but hopefully exposing all the guilty parties here will give them closure.

“I think what we can help them do is find out the truth and uncover what people knew and when they knew it,” he said. “Could this have been prevented, or could it have been stopped at an earlier time so that they didn’t have to suffer what they went through?”

DeKalb County Superintendent Jason Barnett and Principal King both left their jobs following Dalton’s arrest in 2020. While King retired, Barnett now holds the Superintendent position with the Guntersville school system.

“It’s a distressing fact of this kind of case that these folks — even being on notice of this kind of behavior — can still find a place in our education system,” Artrip said.

He plans to target Barnett, King and other Sylvania school officials in a separate lawsuit in the coming months.

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