Former Sunset Ridge School janitor pleads guilty to secretly filming students and staff in bathroom, gets 4 years in prison
A former school custodian has been sentenced to four years in prison, after he pleaded guilty to secretly filming students and staff in the bathroom at a middle school in Chicago's northern suburbs.
David Garcia-Espinal, 47, pleaded guilty on Monday to 11 counts of unauthorized videotaping. A judge sentenced him to 4 years in prison, and he'll get credit for more than 230 days he's already spent in custody.
He used to work at the Sunset Ridge School in Northfield, Illinois, where police have said he hid a video camera in a school bathroom in 2020, and recorded students and staff without their knowledge or consent.
Garcia-Espinal was first charged in January 2020, but was on the run for six years before he was arrested in Los Angeles in February 2026. Authorities believe he fled the country before his arrest.
He worked at the school as a custodian through the Smith Maintenance Company between 2015 and 2020. In 2016, he took on a second job at the school as a cook through OrganicLife.
In a previous complaint against the companies, it was noted that Garcia-Espinal has a criminal background and a long pattern of inappropriate behavior. The companies were accused of failing to conduct adequate background checks before hiring him.
Sunset Ridge School District 29 superintendent Edward Strange, at the time, said both vendors conducted criminal background checks on Garcia-Espinal and didn't find anything. School officials also said there were no prior complaints about Garcia-Espinal. The district said it never ran an independent background check, but instead, it relied on the third-party vendor to do so.
An investigation by CBS News Chicago found that in 2010, Garcia-Espinal was caught on two separate occasions taking pictures of women while they were urinating in a movie theater restroom at the Northbrook Mall. He was banned from the mall.
Then, in 2012, he admitted to going to the Regal Theater in Glenview and entering a woman's bathroom to masturbate. He also admitted to doing the same thing at the Northbrook theater. He was never charged in either incident.
Garcia-Espinal also pleaded guilty to identity fraud in 2012 and was sentenced to probation. He was fined for violating his probation in 2013.
CBS News Chicago was contacted by an L.A. restaurant owner who said Garcia-Espinal was working for him under an alias last year, when a customer found a camera recording inside the restaurant bathroom. He allegedly ran away as police were called and evaded police until his arrest in February.
