Teacher Forced 7-Year-Old Boy with Special Needs to Eat His Own Vomit: Why Wasn't She Sentenced to Prison?

An Indiana school teacher who forced a student with special needs to eat his own vomit learned her fate on Monday, April 21 — and won’t spend any time in prison.

Sara Seymour, 29, entered a guilty plea to a charge of neglect of a dependent just before her trial was set to start as part of a deal with prosecutors, who agreed to drop a charge of failure to make a report.

After hearing from both sides and accepting her guilty plea, Judge Rhett Stuard sentenced Seymour to a year in prison during her court appearance in Hendricks County.

Court records show that Seymour then received two days credit for the time she spent in jail after her initial arrest, and had the remaining 363 days suspended by the judge, meaning she will serve no additional time.

The charges stem from an incident that occurred at Brown Elementary School back in February 2023.

Per a probable cause affidavit filed by the Brownsburg Police Department and obtained by PEOPLE, Seymour and four other teachers were with the boy in the school’s lunch room on Feb. 16, 2023.

Footage from a security camera shows the boy appearing to gag on his food, according to the affidavit.

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Seymour is then seen telling the boy to sit down as another teacher places a lunch tray in front of the boy as he starts to vomit, the affidavit says.

Once he finishes vomiting, another teacher — identified by police as 63-year-old Deborah Kanipe — is seen handing the boy a spoon and he is “compelled to eat some of his own vomit,” according to the affidavit.

Both Seymour and Kanipe are then seen standing by the boy’s side as he then began to spoon the vomit into this mouth, the affidavit says.

The video shows that once he has had a few spoonfuls, the boy is instructed to clean up the rest of the vomit with paper towels.

Police said in a release announcing her arrest that prior to this incident, “Seymour is said to have allegedly advised the victim that if he vomited, he would be required to eat what he threw up,”

The school did not learn about the incident until a month after it occurred because none of the teachers present filed a report, police said.

All five teachers involved eventually resigned or were terminated from the school, said police, including two who witnessed the incident and failed to report it and the teacher who handed the boy a tray that day.

Seymour and Kanipe were terminated by the school within days of officials learning about the video.

Kanipe, 63, is facing the same two charges as Seymour but is preparing to take her case to trial, which is scheduled for June.