DIRTY BASTARD

LOS ANGELES — A veteran elementary school teacher was arrested on horrifying child molestation charges after a film processor gave police photos showing blindfolded children with their mouths taped and cockroaches on their faces, authorities said Tuesday.

Mark Berndt, 61, was arrested Monday at his Torrance home and remained jailed on $2.3-million bail, according to a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department statement.

The charges involve 23 boys and girls ages 6-10 between 2008 and 2010.

The investigation started when the film processor gave authorities 40 photos depicting blindfolded children in a classroom with their mouths taped shut.

Berndt worked for more than 30 years at Miramonte Elementary in an unincorporated area of south Los Angeles before being fired as a result of the investigation. Miramonte serves a poor, mainly Hispanic neighborhood. More than half of its approximately 1,400 students still are learning English, according to the school’s website.

Some of the photos showed Berndt with his arm around children or with his hand over their mouth. Other pictures depicted girls with what appears to be a spoon up to their mouths as if they were going to ingest a clear-white liquid.

Sheriff’s Lt. Carlos Marquez of the Special Victims Bureau said it was determined the children were given semen on a spoon or on a cookie. A blue plastic spoon and container found in trash in Berndt’s classroom tested positive for semen, the sheriff’s statement said.

None of the photos showed the students actually eating the semen, but Marquez said the children reported they didn’t like the taste. Authorities are recommending the children be tested for sexually transmitted diseases.

Some of the children’s mouths and faces had large, live Madagascar-type cockroaches on them, according to the statement.

The incidents occurred during school hours, but not all the children were students of Berndt, Marquez said.

None of the alleged victims told anyone about the incidents, Marquez said. “They didn’t know they were being violated in that manner. They just thought it was a game,” he said.

Berndt is unmarried, has no children and there’s no indication of a previous arrest record, authorities said.

“I am sickened and horrified by the behavior of Mark Berndt,” Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent John Deasy said in a statement.

More than 80 current and former students and school employees were interviewed for the investigation. Searches of the classroom and Berndt’s home turned up about 390 photos depicting children, Marquez said.

In addition, a DVD depicting adult sexual bondage “which mirrored the bondage-type photos of the children” was found during the search, the sheriff’s department said, noting that those images are not a crime.