A Washington Substitute Teacher Gets 15 Years for Sexually Abusing and Filming a 13-Year-Old. Her Lawyer’s Defense: It’s a Small Town.
- 180 months (15 years) federal prison sentence imposed by U.S. District Judge Thomas O. Rice, plus 10 years of supervised release — U.S. Attorney's Office, Eastern District of Washington
- Feb. 2021 – July 2022 span of the abuse, beginning when the victim was 13 and Campos-Hernandez was 21 — DOJ / KPQ
- $15,000 in special assessments ordered for victim-assistance funds under two federal statutes — U.S. Attorney's Office, Eastern District of Washington
- 3 months Campos-Hernandez's total tenure as a Warden High School substitute teacher, spring 2022 — iFIBER ONE News / Columbia Basin
Andrea Lee Campos-Hernandez, 26, was a substitute teacher at Warden High School in rural Grant County, Washington, for three months in the spring of 2022. On August 26, 2026, a federal judge in Spokane sentenced her to 180 months — 15 years — in prison for producing child sexual abuse material as part of a sexual relationship she initiated with one of her students when he was 13 years old.
The sentence closes a case that began the way these cases often do: with a family member checking a teenager’s phone. What set the sentencing hearing apart was the defense her attorney offered the court — that in a small town like Warden, it is not unusual for adolescents and young adults to spend time together, and that Campos-Hernandez had simply blurred those lines rather than acted on any interest in children.
U.S. District Judge Thomas O. Rice of the Eastern District of Washington handed down the sentence in Spokane, closing out a federal case that began with Campos-Hernandez’s March 2023 arrest. She pleaded guilty in May 2026 to a single federal count — sexual exploitation of a minor, the statute covering the production of child sexual abuse material — under a plea agreement that called for the 180-month term Rice ultimately imposed. A second federal count, distribution of child pornography, was dismissed as part of the agreement.
Beyond the prison term, Rice ordered 10 years of supervised release once Campos-Hernandez is out, plus $15,000 in special assessments — $10,000 under the Amy, Vicky, and Andy Child Pornography Victim Assistance Act and $5,000 under the Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act, both federal statutes that direct payments to survivors of child exploitation. First Assistant U.S. Attorney Pete Serrano told the court the betrayal went beyond the underlying crime: “As a teacher, every family entrusted their children to Ms. Campos-Hernandez. Her violation of that sacred trust extended by each family and each student places her victimization on another level.”
The case against Campos-Hernandez was built on her own devices. According to court filings, she photographed and recorded video of herself and the victim over roughly seventeen months, and separately sent him partially nude images of herself. Grant County prosecutors filed the first charges in March 2023 — second-degree child rape, third-degree child rape, and possession of depictions of a minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct — after the boy’s older sister found Campos-Hernandez alone with him under a blanket, then reviewed his phone and found messages between the two. He confirmed the abuse when she confronted him.
Investigators executed a search warrant on Campos-Hernandez’s phone on March 3, 2023, and recovered the images and video described in the criminal complaint; she was arrested three days later while leaving her job as a childcare provider at Big Bend Community College in Moses Lake. Prosecutors built the federal production-of-child-pornography case around that same digital evidence — the recordings that carried her federal production-of-child-pornography charge to a fifteen-year sentence.
At sentencing, defense attorney Lorinda Meier Youngcourt did not dispute the underlying conduct. Instead, she asked Judge Rice to weigh it against geography. In court filings, Youngcourt argued that in the small town of Warden it is not unusual for adolescents and young adults to socialize together, and that Campos-Hernandez had blurred the norms of age-appropriate relationships rather than acted out of any predatory interest in children. She cited a psychological evaluation concluding Campos-Hernandez was not driven by a deviant sexual interest in children or a predatory compulsion, but was socially immature, lacked self-esteem, and had a distorted understanding of her “relationship” with the boy.
“Like any male offender, defendant demonstrated a sexual interest in a 13-year-old victim and pursued him.”
Assistant U.S. Attorney Ann Wick, rebutting the defense's mitigation argument
Prosecutors rejected the framing outright. Assistant U.S. Attorney Ann Wick told the court Campos-Hernandez pursued a 13-year-old with the same intent any offender would carry, regardless of her sex or the town’s size. Serrano made the same point in blunter terms elsewhere in the hearing, arguing that female sexual offenders must be held to the same standard as male ones — a direct rebuke of a mitigation argument built on Warden’s population rather than the age of the victim.
The boy at the center of the case addressed Campos-Hernandez directly before Rice announced the sentence. “Today I am speaking because you no longer get to control my voice,” he told her. “You took away parts of my childhood that I will never get back.” His mother and sister also spoke, describing nights spent listening to him cry alone in his room before the family understood what he had been experiencing — the same sister whose decision to check his phone in early 2023 opened the case.
A federal sentencing hearing is where a case like this one legally ends and a prison term begins; it is also, structurally, the one place a victim is guaranteed a chance to speak on the record. That is what happened in Spokane on August 26 — a courtroom built to decide one defendant’s punishment became the forum where a boy, old enough now to describe what was taken from him, did exactly that.
Campos-Hernandez was never a full-time hire. She substitute-taught at Warden High School for three months in spring 2022 — March, April, and June — while also working as a childcare provider through Big Bend Community College and as a student-support worker in Washington State University’s GEAR UP program at Moses Lake High School, a federally funded college-readiness initiative for low-income students. Washington requires substitute teachers to clear a fingerprint-based background check through the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction before they can be placed in a classroom — the same screening every certificated teacher passes.
None of those checks are built to flag a relationship that predates the hire. Campos-Hernandez’s abuse of the victim began in February 2021, roughly a year before Grant County records show her substitute-teaching at his school — meaning the background screening she cleared to enter the classroom was never designed to catch what had already started. Warden School District has not publicly addressed Campos-Hernandez’s employment file or said whether administrators were aware of any relationship between her and the student before her 2023 arrest.
Andrea Lee Campos-Hernandez, a 26-year-old former Warden, Washington substitute teacher, will serve 15 years in federal prison for producing child sexual abuse material as part of a sexual relationship with a student that began when he was 13. Her attorney’s mitigation argument — that small-town norms, not predatory intent, explained her conduct — was rejected by prosecutors and matched by a sentence at the top of what her plea agreement allowed. The case turned on evidence Campos-Hernandez created and stored herself, on her own phone.
