In the recording, a man’s voice sounds as if he’s talking to someone named Kathy, whom many listeners interpreted to be Vice Principal Kathy Albert. She told police she never had the conversation in the clip.

The man’s voice in the recording says he has to “put up” with “ungrateful Black kids who can’t test their way out of a paper bag” and Black teachers who “should have never been hired.” The recording continues with the man saying he’s “sick of the inadequacies of these people” and if he “has to get one more complaint from one more Jew in this community, I’m going to join the other side.”

Three Pikesville High employees — Darien and two physical education teachers who police said were friends with him — received an email from an unfamiliar email address with the MP3 recording around 10 p.m. Jan. 16, about a half-hour before the clip went viral on social media, police wrote.

The recording named one of the PE teachers as someone who shouldn’t have been hired. When she received the email with the audio clip, she sent it to a student and emailed it to several media outlets, she told police. The student then “rapidly spread the message around various social media outlets and throughout the school,” police wrote.

The teacher told detectives she was having professional issues with Eiswert and was not renewing her contract to work at Pikesville High. Baltimore County’s school board last week received Darien’s and the two teachers’ resignations from Pikesville High.

In an interview with detectives, Darien denied involvement in the recording or its release. He said he was unfamiliar with the email that sent the recording to him. Over two months, detectives subpoenaed documents from Google, AT&T and T-Mobile that led to an internet provider address registered to Darien’s grandmother, police wrote in charging documents.

The recovery cellphone number associated with the Google account was registered to Darien, police wrote. The number has since been disabled. Detectives also consulted an FBI contractor and a forensic analyst, who said the recording “contained traces of AI-generated content with human editing after the fact,” such as background noise for realism.

A BCPS information technology employee searched Darien’s access to the system’s network and found that he used language tools and accessed OpenAI tools and Microsoft Bing Chat services that are similar to OpenAI three times — Dec. 18, Dec. 19 and Jan. 15, the last being a day before the audio clip was released.

A second expert opinion from a forensic analyst said the recording was manipulated with multiple recordings placed together, police wrote.

Rogers said the school system filed a recommendation to terminate Darien. School officials are investigating the two PE teachers, who are on leave. McCullough said the criminal investigation is ongoing.

The theft accusation, which Rogers says is ongoing, entails Darien allegedly paying his roommate, a junior varsity coach, $1,910 to be an assistant coach with the girls soccer team, something the roommate didn’t do.

In the wake of the recording, teachers feared that recording devices were planted in the school, which created a rift in trust between teachers and administrators, according to police.

Cindy Sexton, president of the Teachers Association of Baltimore County, which represents athletic directors, said the union is waiting for the criminal investigation to unfold. TABCO and the National Education Association are troubled by AI being manipulated and used against educators, she said.

“As a society, we need to get in front of and get a handle on AI because of, unfortunately, situations like this are going to continue to happen,” Sexton said. “Our students are tech-savvy; lots of people are. It opens up a whole new world of concern for all of us. We all have our voices out there.”

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