Video: Russell County sheriff announces arrest of deputy for alleged sexual relationship with student

The Sheriff's Office received some information in the last couple of days that a potential Russell County deputy that was assigned to our school system had potentially had a relationship with a student at the high school. We immediately started investigating the the the allegation and last night we were able to charge uh Joseph Wayne Cooner a Russell County school resource officer with four charges of school employee engaging in a sex act with a student under 19. that statute is 13a6-81 understand that the statute is specific about um who it relates to obviously employees of the school system but also SROs as well as volunteers that could be coaches volunteer coaches community coaches those types of things so it's very specific that the SRO even though they're not an employee they work in the school district around the students and so this statute is very specific to the SRO position we believe that the evidence will show that in the last month there were four encounters with the deputy and the student you know the deputy is being held at the Tallapoosa County Jail we don't hold folks here in our facility that have worked here he has worked as a officer in Lee and Chambers County and so i'm he is being held in the Tallapoosa County Jail and will receive a bond this morning by the judge and so once he receives a bond um we will send that out and let everybody know what that bond is because currently he does not have one and we don't know what it will be obviously this case is under investigation so there's not a whole lot that that i can tell you other than what i've mentioned already i think the important part to take away is that our students and our faculty is the most important thing it doesn't matter who you are to include a deputy sheriff that's with my office if you violate these laws you're going to go to jail and that's what's happened in this case we're not going to put up with it and there's not going to be you know anything that's not looked into when it comes to allegations this is a single incident uh there are no other students involved this is a one-on-one scenario so we are confident that there are no other students involved other than the single student that that we know about and is our victim so i i want to stress that you know we have taken all measures to make sure that the students are safe this particular deputy was assigned to the middle school there are no issues at the middle school the student in question was at the high school and so there there's nothing else that we are aware of right now period if something were to come up we would investigate it fully.