FREEHOLD — Despite the “predatory” nature of a months-long sexual relationship a special education teacher carried on with an eighth-grader in her class at Freehold Intermediate School, a judge Friday ordered the 43-year-old Jackson woman released from jail to await trial on child sex charges.

Superior Court Judge Vincent N. Falcetano ordered Allison Havemann-Niedrach released from the Monmouth County Jail and placed her on home detention, with certain restrictions that include no contact with minors except her own two children, ages 5 and 12, and no use of a computer to lessen her chances of contacting the victim or other children.

“Clearly this is a very, very serious and disturbing offense,” Falcetano said at a detention hearing for Havemann-Niedrach.

“I don’t have the vocabulary to describe how serious and disturbing it is,” the judge said. “It’s predatory, it is a breach of trust, it crosses the line. As a special education teacher, she should have known that line is even closer than for a regular teacher.”

Danielle Zanzuccki, an assistant Monmouth County prosecutor, asked Falcetano to keep Havemann-Niedrach locked up without bail to await trial on charges of aggravated sexual assault and endangering the welfare of a child.

The charges were the result of an investigation that uncovered, among other evidence, thousands of text messages between the defendant and her 15-year-old victim, including the exchange of photos and video that confirmed the sexual nature of their relationship, Zanzuccki said.

She was “obsessed with this child,” and poses a danger to him and the community at large, the assistant prosecutor said of the defendant.

Falcetano said Havemann-Niedrach wouldn’t pose a danger to the victim while on home detention if she doesn’t contact the boy, but he warned the defendant that if she does, he will send her back to jail.

The judge also said that ordinarily, he would order the defendant to seek employment while on pretrial release, since she’s lost her job with the Freehold school district, but he said he declined to do so because he doesn’t want her using a computer.

Defense attorney William Wackowski told the judge his client would live with her elderly parents in Jackson while awaiting trial, instead of with her husband and children. He noted that Havemann-Niedrach’s husband and parents were in the courtroom to support her.

Havemann-Niedrach had been in jail since her arrest on June 26.

Zanzuccki outlined the investigation leading to the arrest.

Freehold Borough police were alerted around the beginning of June about concerns the vice principal of Freehold Intermediate School had about the relationship between the defendant and the victim, the assistant prosecutor said.

Other school staff had reported that the defendant had been bringing the victim food and eating lunch with him daily in one of the classrooms, Zanzuccki said.

Another teacher reported witnessing the defendant rubbing the victim’s back and neck and touching his leg, and that she appeared to be flirting with him, Zanzuccki said.

Police alerted the victim’s mother, who indicated she was concerned because her daughter told her she had seen her brother sitting in the teacher’s car and that he was continuously on the phone late at night, the assistant prosecutor said.

The victim also told a friend that he was dating a teacher, she said.

When police questioned the boy, he denied there was anything going on between him and Havemann-Niedrach. He claimed he was dating the teacher’s daughter, Zanzuccki said.

At that point, the boy turned over his cell phone to police, and police discovered there were more than 25,000 text messages between the defendant and the victim, the assistant prosecutor said.

A few days later, the boy’s mother contacted police and told them that her son admitted to her that he had been in a sexual relationship with Havemann-Niedrach, the assistant prosecutor said. At that point, there were concerns for the boy’s mental health, and he was brought to a hospital to be evaluated, she said.

Days later, the boy asked that the police keep his cell phone “because he did not want to communicate with the defendant anymore and he believed that that was the only way that the communication would be stopped,” Zanzuccki told the judge.

Within days, the victim gave a statement to police admitting to the sexual relationship with his teacher, telling them it began around January and included sexual relations at the defendant’s house as well as at hotels, the assistant prosecutor said.

The investigation recovered evidence that Havemann-Niedrach had booked a hotel room in the vicinity of where cell-phone location services placed the victim, corroborating his story, Zanzuccki said.

An examination of the text messages between the pair so far includes photos of a sexual nature, as well as “a video of them engaging in sexual conduct,” Zanzuccki said.

Investigators still have not gone through all of the voluminous communications found on the victim’s phone, she said.

Zanzuccki said Havemann-Niedrach started to groom the victim by buying him food and giving him gifts of sweatshirts, t-shirts and socks, the assistant prosecutor said. She also sent a ring to his house, which was apparently a replacement for one she had given him previously and had been lost, Zanzuccki said.

The victim told police that Havemann-Niedrach told him to deny their relationship, the assistant prosecutor said. The boy also told investigators that she would get mad at him if he didn’t answer her phone calls, Zanzuccki said. In addition, she threatened the boy, telling him she was going to report their affair to school administrators, and she even devised a text message doing just that, Zanzuccki said. Havemann-Niedrach never sent that text message to the school, but she did send a photo of it to the victim, Zanzuccki said.

“This relationship situation was so much for him to bear that he ended up having a mental health issue,” the assistant prosecutor said of the victim.

Falcetano ordered Havemann-Niedrach to appear in court before Superior Court Judge Jill Grace O’Malley on Aug. 8.

Kathleen Hopkins, a reporter in New Jersey since 1985, covers crime, court cases, legal issues and just about every major murder trial to hit Monmouth and Ocean counties. Contact her at khopkins@app.com.

This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: Freehold special-ed teacher freed to await trial on child-sex charges