Former student testifies to having sex several times with North Texas school counselor

A young Dallas County man testified Thursday that when he was a student at Harwood Junior High he had sex several times with a school counselor and told her that he loved her at least once during their brief relationship.

The now 21-year-old man said he broke off the relationship when his mother caught them having sex at the family’s home in Euless.

“The look on my mother’s face,” the man told the Tarrant County jury Thursday morning, “I knew we had to stop.”

His testimony came on the second day of the trial for former Harwood Junior High School counselor Shannon Hathaway. The Star-Telegram is not identifying the man because the case involves sexual allegations.

Hathaway, who was married and had twin baby girls at the time of the alleged relationship, has pleaded not guilty in the case. She is charged with multiple counts of improper relationship between an educator and a student.

Hathaway is accused of having sex with the then ninth-grade student nearly a dozen times at her Keller home and his home in Euless.

His sister told authorities that during the 2016-17 school year, Hathaway would spend a lot of time with her brother, according to a warrant obtained by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 2018.

The man’s sister made an outcry in May 2018, and Hathaway was arrested and charged a few weeks later after an investigation.

The young man testified before a Tarrant County jury of eight men and four women Thursday morning that he first had sex with Hathaway at her Keller home in 2016 when he, his sister and a friend of his sister spent a night at Hathaway’s home.

“I was incredibly nervous because I never had had sex before,” the man said. “My face was flush and I was shaking.”

But the man said Hathaway told him to relax and she performed a sex act on him before the two had intercourse.

“I couldn’t be it had happened,” he said when prosecutor Bill Vassar asked it felt for a 17-year-old to be having sex with an adult woman. “I was in shock.”

The young man also testified they had sex at his Euless home and made out at her office and other rooms at Harwood Junior High, making sure they stayed away from school cameras and faculty members.

The school is in the Hurst-Euless-Bedford school district.