'If you pray, pray for Ian Grayson': Austin teacher in bigger trouble than pot bust

More details are coming out via the Austinist about the Austin high school teacher reportedly arrested for .033 ounces of marijuana. Now KXAN-TV, on whose report Grits' earlier post was based, has reported additional, clarifying detail about why police executed the search warrant. Says the Austinist:

Now we know why the police were there - on the 13th, Grayson allegedly sent "inappropriate" text messages to a sixteen year old, one of his students.

And there's more. According to the "Proposed Suspension Without Pay of Term Contract Employee Pending Termination" for Grayson, the teacher "had been previously arrested on February 25, 2012, for driving while intoxicated and failed to timely disclose said arrest to AISD..."

Regardless of how you feel about the marijuana charge, we can all recognize this case isn't so much about bong-rips as a pattern of illegal activity, the worst of which, obviously, has nothing to do with a few sprinkles of pot.

The alleged inculpatory texts certainly justify the warrant, and if that had been reported I'd not have questioned its issuance. But I still find the arrest for de minimis pot possession in such a situation to be bit like piling on. (They let him bond out, reported KXAN, so presumably nobody told the judge he was an immediate threat.) Any sex-crime charges he may end up facing would be much, much more serious than pot possession in a school zone.

To add a grim prequel to the current trials of Ian Grayson, a Grits commenter pointed out a heart wrenching story about Ian Grayson's family that I'll excerpt here in closing:

Ian Grayson is Rod Grayson's son...Ian was a baby when he lost his father, Rod...student (now attorney) John Daniel Christian fatally shot Rod Grayson in class in 1978...Ian grew up without a father and chose teaching as his vocation...an honorable decision...perhaps part of a family's legacy of being teachers...for whatever reason, a good man and a good teacher have been destroyed ... 

This is the second time that Austin students have lost a talented and caring teacher named Mr. Grayson, although we can only hope this farcical time is not permanent. John Daniel Christian, then a Murchison student, now a lawyer, fatally shot his teacher Rod Grayson one May day in 1978. We (Texans) gave the lethal injection to David Powell for a murder committed on the same day, but most people have forgotten (or never knew about) Rod Grayson and his shooter. Very, very, sad. If you pray, pray for Ian Grayson.

From all I can tell via our friends at Google, the story about Grayson's father checks out, and Michael Corcoran has much more, calling the murder "Austin's secret." Grayson's killer was "the son of George Christian, former White House press secretary under Lyndon Johnson, John Christian [who] is currently a tax lawyer in Austin." Reports Corcoran, "Recently suspended Austin High School geography teacher Ian Grayson was only a year old when his father was killed in that classroom."

What a terrible, multi-generational family (and AISD) tragedy; much bigger, and profoundly sadder, it seems, than just a small-time pot bust.