When Eagan police detective Chad Clausen received a report that an Eagan High School teacher may have had an inappropriate relationship with a student, he believed the matter needed a closer look.
Clausen opened an investigation into music teacher Brett David Benson in 2022 after the Rosemount-Apple Valley-Eagan district contacted police on a report that Benson, then age 35, allegedly sneaked a student out of her room during a school trip to Italy.
The detective eventually interviewed more than 40 people, including teachers, parents and Benson’s former students. He also spoke to Benson, who denied any wrongdoing.
What Clausen concluded, according to his 100-page investigative report completed in 2023, went much deeper than a single allegation on a school trip.
Benson had a “pattern of predatory grooming behaviors … with numerous students” going back a decade in two school districts, Clausen wrote.
According to the report, Benson would allegedly pay extra attention to certain girls in his classes, flirt with them, compliment their appearances, give them gifts, exchange private messages with them and find ways to spend time alone with them.
In some cases, the investigative report said, he exchanged sexual messages with them after they turned 18. One student alleged that he had sexual contact with her on her last day of high school.
But despite the information gathered during the nearly two-year police investigation, no criminal charges were ever filed. Benson kept his teaching license in Minnesota until the end of 2024; he surrendered it after one of his alleged victims contacted the state teacher licensing board.
Minnesota has layers of state laws and procedures designed to prevent inappropriate relationships between teachers and students. The Benson case raises questions about how well those systems work.
MPR News obtained a redacted copy of the Eagan police report prepared by Clausen through a public records request and spent months reviewing other documents and conducting interviews for this story. The reporting revealed:
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Eagan police in 2023 concluded that Benson had been carrying on inappropriate relationships with teenage girls who were students at schools where he worked as early as 2011 when he was a reserve teacher and director of the show choir band at Jefferson High School in the Bloomington district.
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In interviews with Clausen, the Eagan detective, two Eagan High School teachers said they had observed instances of what they believed was inappropriate behavior and wondered if they should report it but did not. One said he was reluctant to call out a colleague.
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In 2023, Eagan police referred the case of one alleged victim to the Dakota County Attorney’s Office for possible prosecution. The prosecutors declined because the student was 18 when the sexual contact allegedly occurred.
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Amid the broader police investigation, the Minnesota Department of Education’s student maltreatment unit investigated the Italy trip allegation and Benson’s relationship with that student. In 2023, it determined that Benson did not maltreat the student, because there was “no sexual material or communication” and no “inappropriate contact or relationship of a sexual nature.”
The Minnesota Department of Education and the state teacher licensing board declined to comment in detail on their actions and conclusions in Benson’s case, citing data privacy laws. School officials also declined to comment on Benson beyond his employment record, citing “classified, private personnel data.”
Benson “vehemently” denied any wrongdoing when contacted by MPR News about the allegations in the Eagan police report. In a statement, he said he was thankful the “thorough police and Minnesota Department of Education investigations are closed, resulting in no criminal charges and findings of no student maltreatment.”
The allegations discussed in this story are drawn from the Eagan police investigative report. MPR News interviewed two women who spoke to Eagan police. They agreed to allow their names to be used in this story.
Investigation alleges ‘inappropriate relationships’
The Eagan police investigative report found “a pattern where Brett appears to identify young, female students early on in their high school careers” who were “petite … often shy and lacked self-confidence … he grooms and manipulates them, slowly gaining their trust … these inappropriate relationships go back to 2011.”
When Clausen interviewed Benson in 2022 at the start of his investigation, he wrote that Benson appeared “very nervous,” adding that he played down his relationship with the female student Clausen was questioning him about, saying he was “close to many of his students.”
According to the police report, he admitted it was a “lapse of judgment” to go running alone with a student on the Italy trip. He also acknowledged giving hugs to students “on occasion.”
Once Clausen began reviewing email and text messages between Benson and one of his female students, the detective concluded the teacher was not acting appropriately.
Clausen wrote that he’d also found a series of messages written in 2018 between Benson and an adult woman he was dating and whom he would eventually marry in which the woman said she was upset Benson had been “capable of casually hiding” an “inappropriate relationship with a student.”
Benson, in a series of text messages quoted in the police report, wrote to the woman that he believed he could “just avoid the mess if I just got rid of it at my own pace,” and that it “wasn’t the right plan.” He added that “all of these people are basically out of my life” and that he didn’t “have any romantic engagements” with them.
‘An incident with a student this morning’
The police report alleges a pattern where girls initially saw their interactions with Benson as positive but that his behavior with some of them grew more inappropriate and in some cases eventually included sexting after they turned 18.
Hannah LoPresto told police that was her experience, according to the report.
LoPresto described herself as a studious and quiet 14-year-old in 2012 when she met 25-year-old Benson at Eagan High School where he was a music teacher.
She enjoyed English, theater and playing percussion instruments in orchestra and marching band. Benson, one of several teachers in the Eagan High School music department, was younger than the other teachers and well-liked.
He was “super charismatic,” LoPresto recalled. Students “were excited to come to his class. It seemed like he was really invested in all of us and just wanted us to have a good time and learn and be our best.”
Students at Eagan High School described Benson as a “touchy-feely” guy, according to Clausen’s police report. Some openly discussed his flirtatious behavior with female students.
“He was like a fun, friendly person,” LoPresto said.
According to the police investigation, after a few years of friendly high-fives, hugs at school and one-on-one percussion lessons, Benson’s behavior changed. He started texting and emailing LoPresto from personal phone and email accounts and talking to her in extended conversations outside of class about his private life. Sometimes he called her out of class to meet him in a practice studio. He told her she was wise beyond her years and different from other students.
On a senior-year school band trip to Greece, he arranged to sit next to her on the plane so they could watch movies and listen to music together. When they got back to Minnesota, he gave her a framed photo and said he wanted to write her a message but that he couldn’t because she wasn’t yet 18.
At another point, “Brett told her that he wanted her to be with him after graduation and that he was going to marry her,” Clausen wrote in his report.
She told the detective that Benson’s attention began to feel like something she couldn’t escape. At times she liked being around Benson, and at other times found his behavior confusing or frightening, she told Clausen, adding that she felt like she had to hide her relationship with him.
According to the police report, on her last day of high school, soon after she turned 18, Benson asked her to meet him in the percussion lesson room before school. His texts with her had grown sexual, and he’d told her that he was “a man of God, and like God had put me in his life for this reason,” LoPresto told the police investigator.
When she arrived in the lesson room, LoPresto said Benson put his hands down her shirt and pants. LoPresto was so shocked, she froze and then began to cry.
“I was clearly like, not OK, and just crying and like, shaking,” she recalled. “It was like I couldn’t communicate.”
She said Benson wrote her a hall pass, and she left for her first class. “[N]o one asked her what was going on and she pretended like it did not happen,” Clausen wrote in his report.
That same day, the last day of school for Eagan seniors like LoPresto, the investigative report says Benson texted his parents: “An incident with a student this morning that once again is causing me anxiety and I’m not handling it well. I’m in my head about it.”
He sent a similar note to the woman he eventually married, telling her his emotions were “high” due to “an incident with a student this morning that I feel absolutely horrible about. Can’t clear my head.”
Those allegations are in the Eagan police report. While her name is redacted in the report, LoPresto confirmed that it was her account and she had told it to Clausen, the detective.
Following the alleged incident in the percussion room, LoPresto believes she told Benson she didn’t want to talk to him for a while, but they continued to exchange text messages and meet in person that summer.
He showed up at her high school graduation party, and at one point, when they were alone in her house, he “touched her arm and pulled it towards him.” LoPresto said she felt “like he owned her,” according to the police report.
“[H]is charming persona could smooth over any fear that would bubble to the surface,” she wrote in a victim impact statement included in the public investigative report.
LoPresto said she did not tell her family about what she said happened to her until spring 2022, according to the police report. She said Benson continued to pursue her the summer after she graduated, telling her that they would get married.
According to the report, he also sent her sexually explicit text messages that summer and during her freshman year of college. LoPresto described the messages to the police, but investigators were unable to recover them.
She told Clausen, according to the report, that Benson sought sexual contact with her at his house once more.
She said that she felt trapped by and afraid of him and that he would “make her feel crazy or that she was overreacting if there was ever a situation where she did not want to do something,” according to Clausen’s report. She said she stopped hearing from him eventually.
According to Clausen's investigative report, five years before LoPresto graduated high school, Benson allegedly began grooming another student, Sophie Panetti, while he worked at Jefferson High School in Bloomington. Like LoPresto, Panetti agreed to speak to MPR News on the record and to use her name.
According to the investigative report: In 2011, when she was 17, Panetti said Benson gave her his phone number, started texting and flirting with her, commenting on her hair. Panetti said her parents learned of the exchanges, spoke with Benson and told Panetti to stop texting him.
Benson assured Panetti’s parents he “had meant no harm and that it had been an innocent interaction,” according to Clausen’s investigative report. Less than two months later, Panetti said Benson began messaging her again on Facebook, telling her to keep the messages a secret from her parents.
Later, according to the investigative report, he began commenting on her body, telling her he enjoyed her tight-fitting clothing and implying they’d have a sexual relationship after she graduated high school. She exchanged frequent, flirtatious text messages with Benson, according to the investigative report.
“I was so young … I was a child who was desperate for validation,” Panetti wrote in a victim impact statement that’s part of the Eagan police investigative report, adding that after years of therapy, she now believes Benson’s behavior was “predatory.”
The police investigation says Benson stopped contacting her for two years after she graduated then resumed with explicit phone calls and sexting from 2014 through 2017 when she was in college. That was a period during which, according to the Eagan police report, Benson was also sexting LoPresto and another former student who was 20 at the time.
In a supplement to his report, Clausen wrote that after initially speaking briefly with Panetti about what happened to her, “it appears that no crime occurred but rather inappropriate student/teacher relations.” However, he included a “victim impact statement” from her in the concluding summary of his report and wrote that he was referring her case to the Bloomington Police Department.
“You were the first person I ever thought I loved,” Panetti wrote in her statement included in the public investigative report. “I will never get that back. You have tainted so many memories of my high school and even college days. I will never get those back.”
According to a document from a public records request by MPR News, a Bloomington officer interviewed Panetti about Benson earlier this year and forwarded the information gathered to its investigations department “for review.”
Statutory limitations
The Rosemount-Apple Valley-Eagan district placed Benson on paid administrative leave in late March 2022 after school leaders were told Benson had allegedly sneaked a student out of her hotel room during the Italy trip, according to the Eagan police report. The district contacted Eagan police.
When Clausen started interviewing teachers and students about Benson’s alleged behavior, a teacher mentioned LoPresto.
In his report, Clausen said what he heard from her, other students and two teachers he interviewed revealed what he believed was a prolonged “pattern of predatory grooming behaviors.”
Clausen’s conclusions on what allegedly happened to LoPresto were enough to convince Eagan police in December 2023 to refer the case to the Dakota County Attorney’s Office for possible charges of sexual assault.
But no charges were filed. An assistant county attorney wrote in a letter to LoPresto the decision was due to the law in place in 2016 that didn’t make it a crime for a teacher to have sexual contact with a student over age 18. The letter said it was “not based on a belief that we would not be able to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt.”
LoPresto provided MPR News with a copy of the letter. Minnesota in 2021 made it a crime for teachers to have sexual contact with current students 18 and older.
After Dakota County declined to charge Benson with criminal activity, Eagan police submitted Clausen’s police report to the Eagan city attorney to possibly charge Benson with disorderly conduct. Again, no charges were brought.
Benson remained on a paid leave of absence for a year from the Rosemount-Apple Valley-Eagan district until he resigned effective March 2023, according to the school system.
Besides the Eagan police investigation, questions about the 2022 class trip to Italy also led to an inquiry by the Minnesota Department of Education’s student maltreatment program into a possible “inappropriate relationship.”
According to the MDE report, an investigator found that Benson allowed the student involved to “disregard established procedures and practice” during the Italy trip and noted Benson and the student had exchanged more than 10,000 text messages, which he characterized as “excessive and discrete communication.” Benson also discussed “feelings and relationships” in the messages he sent the student.
But investigators found no sexual images or communication in the correspondence they reviewed and so concluded “based on the available information maltreatment is not determined.”
Clausen’s police report, however, says that in January 2023, the student Benson had sneaked out of her hotel room told the detective she now recognized “the relationship they had was extremely inappropriate.”
A few days later, though, she told Clausen she did not want to participate in any effort to possibly charge Benson with a crime, saying she wanted to focus her time and energy on school.
‘Not something that should fall through the cracks’
By January 2024, LoPresto had obtained a copy of the Eagan police investigative report.
She took it to the Minnesota Department of Education to file her own claim with its student maltreatment program, but by that point she was told it was too late, that Minnesota law only allows the agency to investigate allegations about incidents that have occurred within three years of the complaint. It was also too late for LoPresto to pursue civil claims.
So LoPresto went to the Minnesota Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board, which oversees teacher licensing in the state.
There, she confirmed Benson’s license was still valid, allowing him to teach in other schools despite his resignation from Eagan High School. She filed a complaint in March 2024 and gave the licensing board permission to publicly disclose her personal information in order to investigate Benson.
By December 2024, Benson had signed a stipulation agreement with the state licensing board to surrender his Minnesota teaching license.
He waived his right to a contested case proceeding regarding action against his Minnesota teaching license. However, there was no finding of misconduct by the Minnesota Department of Education or the state licensing board, and Benson made no admission of misconduct.
In a statement to MPR News, Benson wrote, “I vehemently deny any allegations of wrongdoing. They are replete with mischaracterizations, exaggerations, and false statements that are wholly inconsistent with who I am as a person and who I was as a teacher. I deeply cared for the well-being of every student I have ever taught.”
“The thorough police and Minnesota Department of Education investigations are closed, resulting in no criminal charges and findings of no student maltreatment. Now, however, I am compelled to defend myself against unproven allegations being aired in the public sphere. I strenuously object to this story, which violates core principles of journalistic ethics. My family and I are thankful this extensive investigation is closed.”
Benson now works in finance in the Twin Cities.
The bar to revoke a teacher’s license is quite high, said Yelena Bailey, executive director of the licensing board.
Unless a teacher is convicted of a serious crime such as sexual violence against a student, license revocation requires a long investigative process that must be approved by the board, and it can take “several months to a year to two years later” for the final decision to be made public, she said.
Public school districts are required to report to the board whenever discipline is taken against a teacher, but many districts fail to take that step when addressing a teacher’s misconduct, she added.
“There unfortunately are a number of circumstances where we find out in the news that something happened in a school district and we were never notified,” Bailey said, adding that she had to reach out to at least five districts in 2024 to tell them they’d failed to report serious teacher misconduct, which the licensing board learned about only through news reports.
“That, to me, seems to be the gap in this because we rely entirely on districts reporting to us, and we have it in law,” Bailey said, speaking generally and not about the Benson case. “This is not something that should fall through the cracks when it comes to the safety and protection of our students.”
While Benson was not disciplined by the district or charged with a crime, the district may have been required to report that he had resigned amid an investigation of alleged misconduct. Due to privacy laws, the teacher licensing board would not confirm whether such a report had occurred.
Teachers didn’t speak up
Teachers and school staff are often the first line of defense when allegations of faculty or teacher misbehavior surface in schools. They’re bound by law to say something if they suspect it.
In his police investigation, Clausen said an Eagan High School teacher told him he’d observed “numerous instances” of what he thought was Benson’s inappropriate interactions with students. He said he didn’t speak up, partly because Benson was someone he worked with daily.
According to the report, the teacher, whose name was redacted, told police that Benson’s behavior with female students was so “flirtatious” he “couldn’t stomach” it and would leave the room to avoid having to watch the behavior.
The report says he observed Benson meeting with a student behind closed doors on campus after school hours and watched Benson seek out alone time with certain students during class trips.
According to the report, this teacher occasionally wondered whether he “should say something to someone.” But he didn't report his concerns because he “had nothing tangible.” School officials declined to comment on the findings of the police report, citing privacy laws.
In a statement, Rosemount-Apple Valley-Eagan said student protection and safety is the district’s top priority and “we encourage students and/or families to report any suspicious behavior by talking to a trusted adult in our schools, using our confidential tip line (found on secondary school websites), or contacting local police.”
Experts say it’s rare for teachers and other mandated reporters to follow through on their legal obligations, although failure by mandated reporters constitutes a misdemeanor or gross misdemeanor and can result in jail time and fines.
Mandatory reporting laws and policies regularly fail because adults are reluctant to admit what they’re observing could be inappropriate, said Nicole Bedera, a Minneapolis-based sociologist who studies the issue.
“Mandatory reporting doesn’t work. There’s no other explanation for it,” she said.
In training sessions, educators are told that they are supposed to report suspected misbehavior. But when faced with potentially reporting a colleague, they may fall back into believing they're only supposed to report actual misbehavior “even though that's not the statute, it’s not the training,” said Molly Burke, a Twin Cities attorney.
Educators “don’t know what grooming is, or they kind of have a loose definition. Grooming is the stuff that is visible, that is in public, that does happen at school, happens in the classroom, in the hallways, at the extracurricular activities,” Burke said.
The system, she added, should do more to encourage teachers and others who suspect grooming to report it, rather than give colleagues the benefit of the doubt and let things that “feel a little icky” slide.
Clausen said he believes more teacher training is needed.
“The action of grooming makes your job as a mandated reporter very, very difficult” given that it’s a slow process, he said.
Ultimately, it was a teenage girl on the Italy school trip who saw something and would not let it slide. She was worried enough about what she saw in Benson’s alleged behavior to contact a chaperone who informed school district officials who told Eagan police.
“It was a student … that had a lot of courage to tell someone what they were seeing and that it didn't seem OK,” LoPresto said. “If they didn’t do that, we wouldn’t be here.”
Over the past year, LoPresto has met with Rosemount-Apple Valley-Eagan officials to press them to strengthen training on mandatory reporting. She’s suggested changes to district policy on chaperoning and overnight field trips.
She’s met with a state lawmaker and urged her to expand the statute of limitations so the Minnesota Department of Education can investigate maltreatment claims older than three years. She hopes the Legislature will make grooming a standalone crime.
In a statement included in the public police report, LoPresto said providing her account gives her hope.
She wrote: “After years of trying to run away from the pain being able to accept it and advocate for myself has led me further into a recovery I’d have never known.”
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