A Maryland high school teacher was arrested for allegedly using artificial intelligence to create fake audio, planting racist and anti-Semitic slurs into his boss's voice, authorities said Thursday.
Dezon Darien, a physical education teacher and athletic director at Pikesville High School, was charged in January with impersonating principal Eric Isort, authorities said.
Baltimore County Police Chief Robert McCullough told reporters in Towson that we now have conclusive evidence that the recording was not authentic. “It has been determined that the recording was produced using artificial intelligence technology.”
Darien was charged with disrupting school activities and other counts.
“As you can imagine this has been a very difficult time for (the) Pikesville High School community, Principal Eiswert and his family,” said Baltimore County Public Schools Superintendent Miriam Rogers.
A judge signed an arrest warrant for Darien on Wednesday afternoon before he was apprehended at Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport on Thursday morning.
McCullough said Darien was scheduled to fly to Houston when security questioned whether he had properly packed his gun for the trip.
Darien's name was run through police records and warrants appeared, leading to the suspect's arrest, he added.
The police chief declined to say whether Darien was trying to escape.
Darien was also charged with burglary, retaliation against a witness and stalking.
According to the arrest warrant, he and Assort were at odds over “work performance challenges” with the suspect's contract.
“Through their investigation, detectives allege that Mr. Darien, who was the athletic director at the high school, made the recording in retaliation against the principal, who had opened an investigation into possible misuse of school funds,” McCullough said.
Police said Assort followed through on a $1,916 payment Darien allegedly made to an assistant girls' soccer coach after the head coach and players said the man never helped the team.
Esurt also reprimanded Darien for terminating the coach without the principal's approval, police said.
Esort was widely admonished after viral audio of him spewing hateful rhetoric, mocking black and Jewish people.
According to the court document, the voice was initially believed to be Isort saying black students were unable to “check their way out of the paper bag.”
“The recording contained derogatory comments about Jewish individuals and two teachers … who 'should never have been hired' at the school,” the warrant said.
Essort always insisted that the recording, which was sent to Darien and two other teachers on the night of Jan. 16, was fake.
The audio spread quickly on social media and had “profound ramifications,” causing “significant disruptions to PHS staff and students,” according to the arrest warrant.
Eiswert has been on paid administrative leave since the recording went viral.
Rogers said the school has been run by district appointees since Assort's departure and that interim administrators will remain on the job through the end of this school year.
“We will be working closely with Principal Isort and the Pikesville community over the next year,” Rogers added.
According to the warrant, investigators linked the email TJFOUST9@gmail.com, which was used to send the audio, to an Internet service provider registered to Darien's grandmother.
Police said the Google account's recovery phone number was a 213 area code, registered to Darien, a resident of Southern California.
A forensic analyst, contracted to the FBI, also found that the recording contained “signs of AI-generated content with human editing after the fact,” the arrest warrant said.
Darren was shown using the Baltimore County Public Schools network to access OpenAI tools and Microsoft BingChat services on Dec. 18 and 19 and Jan. 15, the day before the audio clip was sent, police said. .
Darien and the suspect's family could not immediately be reached for comment Thursday.
The superintendent said the school district will seek to fire Darien.