FARIBAULT, Minn. (KMSP) – Former Shattuck-St Mary’s drama teacher Lynn Seibel appeared in a Rice County, Minnesota courtroom Tuesday to face 17 felony counts of sexual misconduct for allegedly molesting six boys between 1996 and 2003 at the Faribault, Minn., school.
Seibel, 71, was booked in the Rice County jail overnight. He was released from the Los Angeles County Jail on Monday after waiving extradition and was placed in the custody of a deputy who flew in after Californian prosecutors dropped a child pornography charge so the case in Minnesota could proceed.
Bail was set at $200,000 without conditions or $100,000 with conditions at Tuesday’s hearing. Those conditions include:
No contact with alleged victims
No unsupervised contact with anyone under 18
No leaving the state without court permission
A weekly check-in with the court
Seibel plans to live in the Maplewood area as the case plays out. His son lives in the area and is working to find an apartment for him.
Defense attorney James Martin said his first task is to look at statute of limitations issues that could affect the older cases. He also said he may consider a change of venue request.
“Obviously, on a higher-profile case, it’s always a question of whether publicity taints the area jury panels,” he said.
CASE BACKGROUND
Seibel was a former “dorm parent” at Shattuck-St Mary’s, living among the students between 1999-2003.
The investigation began after the Faribault Police Department contacted detectives in Los Angeles to seek help finding and interviewing Seibel because they were investigating claims he had touched teenage students during what he called “AP Drama sessions.”
Seibel faced child pornography-related charges in California before his extradition to Minnesota, but that charge was dropped earlier this month to allow prosecution of the Shattuck case to continue in Rice County.
Seibel faces no new charges at this time.
Shattuck-St. Mary’s is a private boarding school in Faribault with about 450 students. The school has a rich history, and refers to itself as a “center of excellence” with an emphasis on hockey, soccer, figure skating and the arts. It first opened in 1858 and was converted into a military academy in the mid-1860s. It kept the military program until 1974.
On Tuesday, the school released a written statement about Seibel’s appearance in court, saying only: “Today marks an important milestone in the effort to determine the facts … to see that justice is done.”
Yet, questions persist about whether the school covered up the sex abuse by not going to police 10 years ago.
Seibel returned to acting in California in 2003 after resigning from the school when officials found 14,000 sexual images — mostly of underage boys — on his work computer.
Seibel has acting credits for roles on “The Big Bang Theory,” “Dallas,” “Little House on the Prairie,” “Murder She Wrote” and many other TV shows and movies, including “Mighty Ducks 3.”
Fox9