A man recently charged with child exploitation has a long history of other incidents, including as a CPS teacher. NBC Chicago’s Bennett Haeberle reports.
Chicago police arrested a 49-year-old man on Wednesday on charges that he exposed himself to three girls, aged 7, 9, and 10, on two separate days in late September. He has been charged with three felony counts of child-exploitation and exposing himself to children under the age of 13. He will enter a plea at his next court appearance later this month.
The man’s name is Elliott Nott, and NBC 5 Investigates has reported on him before.
Back in 2016, Nott was a teacher at Ogden Elementary School on Chicago’s Near North Side. He’d worked there for six years, teaching music and coaching the school’s track team.
But in September of that year, police arrested Nott for hiding a motion-activated camera in an employee restroom at the school. Police said Nott recorded graphic videos of several teachers – and an 8-year-old special education student – as they used the bathroom.
The day that news broke, NBC5 Investigates ran a background check on Nott and quickly discovered he’d been arrested and convicted before.
In 1993, he was convicted of one “peeping Tom” count after he was caught spying on two neighbor girls when he was a high school student in Normal. Then, in 2004, he was convicted of one count of prowling and loitering after he was caught spying on a young woman in a small town in New Hampshire, where he was then teaching elementary school and working as a college track coach.
When the news of the 2016 secret videotaping at Ogden Elementary broke, NBC 5 Investigates tried to find out how Chicago Public Schools had come to hire Nott despite his past convictions.
Investigations
CPS officials repeatedly refused to answer our questions, and when we requested his job application to CPS, his background information was redacted.
Nott was charged with several counts of unauthorized videotaping, as well as one count of child pornography in connection to the case.
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He eventually pled guilty to several of the videotaping charges, but the single child pornography charge – the only charge that would have required Nott to register as a sex offender -- was dropped.
Nott was given two years of probation, with no jail sentence.
However, NBC 5 Investigates found a document in Nott's criminal court file showing that he was ordered to undergo sex offender treatment as a condition of his probation, even though he had not been convicted of a sex offense.
Nott has never been required to enroll on the Illinois Sex Offender Registry.
Court records showed Nott completed the requirements of his probation in September 2021 and had no other charges in Cook County Criminal Court until the recent child exploitation charges this week.
Nott's next court date is slated for Oct. 30.
“Additional victims are asked to call detectives with the Special Investigations Unit at (312) 492-3810 or submit a tip anonymously online at CPDTIP.com," Chicago police said in a press release.
