Former Middle School Teacher Indicted on Child Pornography Charges

By Don Jorgensen
Keloland
August 26, 2014

http://www.keloland.com/newsdetail.cfm/former-middle-school-teacher-indicted-on-child-pornography-charges/?id=168425

[with video]

A former Rapid City middle school teacher is accused of having child pornography on his personal computer.

A tip last week led police to search 26-year-old Andrew Hiipakka's home on the 400 block of East Fairlane, where several disturbing images were found on his home computer.

Hiipakka is now facing eight counts of possessing, manufacturing, or distributing child porn.

According to these court papers, Hiipakka had stored several videos and other images depicting young boys in various sexual acts, including with some adults.

All of them too offensive to describe in detail on television.

According to police, their ages ranged from three years old to 14-years-old, some of them approximately the same age as some of the students Hiipakka once taught.

He was employed as a teacher at St. Thomas More Middle School. He has since been fired from that job.

Investigators also found several sub-folders on his computer with more than one thousand additional files with child pornography. Not all of those files have been reviewed by police at this time.

Hiipakka remains in the Pennington County Jail on $50,000 cash bond only. Phone calls to the school and the state's attorney's office weren't returned.