photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

Caleb Rahmeier, right, and attorney Tom Bath return from a recess on Thursday, Aug. 6, 2026.

When he saw a YouTube video about teachers behaving inappropriately around students, a teen boy testified Thursday in Douglas County District Court, it made him think about a school district employee he knew.

The employee, he testified, had talked with him about porn, masturbation and sex – things the YouTube creator warned about. He testified that the man had given him rides home late at night, stroked his thigh, asked him for nude photos, asked him about his sex life, asked him to undress.

“That kind of got the gears turning,” he said, “that (the YouTube creator) might be right.”

The employee the teen says did these things is Caleb Zachary Rahmeier, a former award-winning paraprofessional in the Lawrence school district.

And at a preliminary hearing on Thursday, Judge Amy Hanley found that the state had shown probable cause for three felony charges against him: aggravated indecent liberties with a child, sexual exploitation of a child and attempted sexual exploitation of a child.

The crimes allegedly occurred between May 21, 2022, and Sept. 3, 2024. In 2022, the boy was in the seventh grade; he is now 17 and will be a high school senior in the Lawrence school district this year.

Before the teen gave his account at Thursday’s hearing, his mother took the stand and said he’d changed since the alleged incidents.

“We have struggled with (our son),” she said. “… He doesn’t talk to us; he keeps to himself.”

She also described her reaction when she found out what her son said happened: “I collapsed. I was sick to my stomach.” She and her husband felt awful that they hadn’t been able to help him earlier.

“We felt horribly guilty,” the teen’s mother said.

‘We thought it was weird’

The teen testified that he first met Rahmeier when he was in the seventh grade, and that Rahmeier was the person he and other students had recruited to supervise a school video game club. He said he started talking more frequently with Rahmeier after a close friend moved out of state: “I would talk with him a lot at school because I was having trouble making other friends.”

He also said they talked online using the messaging platform Discord, which the teen used to chat with his friends before he had a phone. Rahmeier gave the teen his Discord information at the end of his seventh-grade year, the teen said.

Both the teen and his mother testified that his Discord chats were not being monitored.

On Discord, the teen said, his and Rahmeier’s interactions were “relatively formal and positive” at first. They would talk about Pokemon and other video games “or other things going on.” And they would play video games such as Fortnite, sometimes from 4 p.m. to around midnight, he said.

Prosecutor Megan Ahsens asked the teen’s mother whether this struck her as odd.

“We thought it was weird,” she replied.

The teen testified that he, too, thought some interactions with Rahmeier were “a little strange,” including when Rahmeier showed up to his track meets.

Rides home

In summer 2023, before his freshman year of high school, the teen testified, he began sneaking out of his family’s house late at night to visit a girl he liked. He described her as “the only person that cared for me.”

She lived near Clinton Lake, at least 10 miles away from the teen’s house, so at first he would ride his bike there. He testified that when he told Rahmeier about this, Rahmeier said it was dangerous and that he would drive the teen to her house instead.

About 30 of these late-night rides took place, the teen testified, and he said Rahmeier would do things on them that made him uncomfortable.

He said he would usually leave his house after 10 p.m. and get picked up between 1 and 3 a.m. Rahmeier told him “to not say it was him,” the teen testified, so he would say his cousin gave him a ride instead.

On the rides home, he said, Rahmeier frequently talked about sex.

It came up “at least in 28 out of the 30 rides,” he testified. Sometimes, he said, Rahmeier would ask inappropriate questions about what he and the girl did that night, “if we’d, like, had sex or something along those lines,” or try to give advice about sex, such as “how a pillow could help.”

Other times, he said, Rahmeier talked to him about sex with other males. He recalled Rahmeier saying things like, “it’s normal for people to experiment,” “you shouldn’t knock it till you try it” or that he should “branch out.”

“It felt weird,” the teen said.

On one ride home, the teen said, Rahmeier drove to his own house at 3 a.m. with the teen. He told the teen he needed help moving a microwave, and that the teen should help him “because I owed him for the rides.” The teen testified that “I was visibly uncomfortable.” He asked Rahmeier to take him home, he said, and Rahmeier did.

Lawrence Police Detective Evan Curtis testified Thursday that when the teen described the home, it was consistent with what police observed when they went there to collect Rahmeier’s electronic devices.

On another ride, the teen testified, he and Rahmeier were stopped at a stop sign near the Clinton Lake dam, and Rahmeier grabbed his thigh and suggested that the teen should show Rahmeier his genitals.

“He was saying I should, like, take my pants off and show him,” the teen said.

Rahmeier told him this was a normal thing to do and was “not that big of a deal,” the teen recalled. He said he refused to do what Rahmeier wanted.

He testified that he felt like Rahmeier “had power over me” because he was larger and was the one driving.

In total, there were two to four instances when Rahmeier touched or stroked his thigh, the teen said.

He described other uncomfortable interactions with Rahmeier, too, including how Rahmeier would occasionally touch his hair or “flick or jokingly touch my groin.”

The messages

Over the summer of 2023, the teen said the messages from Rahmeier would also become more sexually explicit.

He said Rahmeier asked him for nude photos around five times. When he would get up to take a shower, he testified, Rahmeier would send a message: “If you’re going to shower, send a picture, hahaha,” sometimes with an emoji.

Ahsens asked if he thought this was intended as a joke.

“I think it was only a joke if I said no,” the teen replied.

This seems to differ from what was included in a police affidavit in support of Rahmeier’s arrest. The details of the Discord messages were heavily redacted in the affidavit, with solid blocks of black ink covering more than two pages, but the affidavit did say that police found no requests by Rahmeier on Discord for nude images of the teen.

Ahsens also asked if Rahmeier had talked to the teen “about being gay” or if he called him a “gay boy.” He said Rahmeier had done that. And he said that Rahmeier would buy him gifts “at least once every two weeks” during that summer, such as video game gift cards.

He also said Rahmeier would sometimes tell him “I love you.”

In the next school year, however, the teen made new friends and was spending more time with them and less time with Rahmeier. He testified that Rahmeier didn’t like this and became “very aggravated and irritated with me.” He would remind him “how much he had done for me and how I was coming off ungrateful,” the teen said.

In December 2023, as the Journal-World reported, Rahmeier won the “Dedication to Education” award from the Lawrence Schools Foundation for his work with “challenged and/or disadvantaged students.” The award comes with a $5,000 cash prize, and the teen recalled that Rahmeier used some of it to buy things for him. He told the teen it was because he would have quit his job if they hadn’t become friends, the teen testified.

After the teen watched that YouTube video about inappropriate interactions between teachers and students, he said, he had concerns about Rahmeier’s access to a child with special needs. He told school staff and then police his version of events.

Rahmeier agreed to speak with police after the school district placed him on administrative leave, and he waived his Miranda rights, as the Journal-World reported. Curtis, the LPD detective, said Rahmeier did tell him that he met kids sometimes at school events like track meets, that he played video games with students and that he had bought things for the teen before.

But Curtis said Rahmeier did not admit to giving the teen rides home. The affidavit said Rahmeier stopped the interview at that point and requested an attorney.

photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

Amy Corrigan of the FBI Heart of America Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory prepares to view explicit images recovered from a computer on Thursday, Aug. 6, 2026.

Digital traces

The court also heard from Amy Corrigan, an analyst from the FBI’s Heart of America Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory. Corrigan was the one who examined the contents of Rahmeier’s computer files.

There were two computers whose contents police downloaded: a gaming PC, and a laptop that Curtis earlier said seemed to have been used to look at pornography. Corrigan said the laptop was associated with user accounts with the names “Bubba” and “Caleb.”

In the laptop contents that she examined, Corrigan said there were many files that were locked behind passwords, or traces of files located on an external hard drive or other device whose data she wasn’t provided with.

Some files she mentioned had names like “boy.rar,” “boytoy.rar,” “sisterbrosleepover” and others far more sexually explicit. One folder had images that seemed to have been taken from a bedroom surveillance camera, including images of boys simulating sex acts.

Corrigan also mentioned a “pedo adoption guide” document that had been accessed, with instructions on such topics as “having a girl, hiding a girl and getting a girl” and “transaction and transportation.”

Some of the traces of images viewed on the laptop, in what Corrigan called the “thumb cache,” could be reconstituted into images using specialized forensic software. In response to questions from defense attorney Tom Bath, she said that these were located “in the bowels of the Microsoft operating system” and would be “super hard to look at” without special tools. No such tools were on the laptop, she said.

The attorneys and Judge Hanley stood behind Corrigan as she viewed these images on a computer at the witness stand and described them aloud. There were over 500 of them, and the few she described were of a young boy engaging in sexually explicit activity with an adult man.

Also found on the laptop was The Onion Router, or Tor, a browser that allows users to access content on the “dark web” that can’t be seen by normal web browsers.

A trial date has not been set yet in Rahmeier’s case. He is next scheduled to appear in court for arraignment on Oct. 13.