Guests - Katey McPherson, Joel Strabala, Lydia Hernandez
A Surveillance Camera Turned Weapon: Inside the Tempe Voyeurism Case
A former Tempe Union High School District surveillance officer has pleaded not guilty to seven counts of voyeurism after allegedly downloading security footage of teenage girls changing clothes at Corona del Sol High School. Katey McPherson, the youth advocate parents call when a school scandal breaks, walked through how it happened — and why the district's response has been almost as troubling as the crime itself.
The cameras in question were installed roughly two years ago under the banner of school safety, approved through the normal chain: principal, director of school safety, director of operations and facilities, governing board, superintendent. The rooms were pitched as a precaution against an intruder coming through the exterior doors that lead to the parking lot. What they became was something else entirely.
"These cameras were facing instruction," McPherson said, describing rooms built for dance and yoga classes — essentially small gyms divided by a partition, complete with mirrors and exterior doors. Because there was no adult supervision between roughly 2:20 and 3 p.m., when the school day ended and coaches hadn't yet arrived, girls started using the rooms to change out of their school clothes and into dance or practice gear. One dance teacher had emailed the principal raising concerns about the setup. According to McPherson, the response from administration was blunt: "tell her no." The cameras stayed.
The employee behind the camera, Antony Cruz, had been recently promoted into the district-level surveillance role after starting just after the Fourth of July. McPherson said Cruz quickly began accessing footage, downloading it first onto his phone, then logging in remotely from home to pull files onto a personal laptop. Investigators are still working to determine how many devices and how many files are involved. In the probable cause statement, Cruz reportedly described turning the footage into a personal "game," slicing video into files of individual girls and building what he called anime-style content around the images — conduct that, given the students involved were minors, crosses directly into the state's child exploitation statutes.
McPherson was careful about the label she'd apply. "I can't judge — he's a pedophile, I don't have that expertise," she said, "but boy, oh boy — if I were guessing, I would guess that."
What frustrates McPherson most isn't the criminal case — that will run its course through the Tempe Police Department and the courts, and victims will have the chance to make impact statements. It's the district's handling of the aftermath. Tempe Union's public statements initially claimed there were no cameras in classrooms or changing areas, and that only one camera and one small group of students were involved. McPherson said that's simply not accurate: it was a classroom, there was more than one camera, and the population of affected students is larger than the district has acknowledged.
"You're not being honest," she said of the district's messaging, "and that is like adding salt to the wound."
McPherson laid out three tracks now in motion for the families involved: the ongoing criminal case, the possibility of civil litigation that some parents are already pursuing, and a mandatory-reporting question — whether staff who knew students were changing in a monitored room failed in their legal obligations. She's watched this pattern before, from Chandler to the East Valley to Tucson, and her prescription is consistent: transparency, a trained crisis communications lead, and an apology, none of which cost a district anything except pride.
"Dr. Brené Brown says clear is kind and kind is clear," McPherson said. "If you're saying there's only one camera and one group of students exposed when there's really two cameras and a larger group exposed, you're not being honest."
The most basic fixes, in her view, are already overdue: real adult supervision during the after-school gap, keys to proper locker rooms for coaches, and IT safeguards that don't let a new hire download two years of footage ten days into a job. "I'm shocked," McPherson said, "that the district did not have additional layers of protection for our students."
Bond Season: Four Ballot Measures and What They'll Cost Pima County Homeowners
With Proposition 427 — the Pima JTED bond — already generating buzz after an earlier interview with Ted Maxwell, the conversation turned to the broader wave of school funding requests landing on Pima County ballots this cycle. Joel Strabala, LD17 chair and a member of the Pima County Election Integrity Commission, walked through what's actually on the table district by district.
Tanque Verde is asking voters to fund a junior high that wants to become a full high school — new construction or major modification, still being worked out. Vail is seeking a 12.5% maintenance and operation override continuation: $17.6 million on top of its existing $141 million budget, money earmarked for building upkeep, custodial work, utilities, and operational services rather than direct classroom spending. Amphitheater's ask is different in kind — the district wants voter approval to sell or lease six properties, including the Copper Creek, Donaldson, Holloway, and Nash elementary campuses, along with parcels on East Wetmore and North San Joaquin Avenue, as its enrollment continues to shrink.
Sahuarita, meanwhile, wants a 15% maintenance and operations override — $7.7 million against a current $62 million budget. Strabala broke down what that means for a typical homeowner: for every $10,000 of a home's tax valuation, expect roughly $15 a year in additional property tax over 15 years. On a home valued in the $300,000-$400,000 range for tax purposes — a common band in Pima County — that adds up fast, and it's a 15-year commitment to cover what is, in effect, a single year's worth of expenses.
Then there are the two countywide asks: Pima JTED and Pima Community College are each seeking $250 million bonds. Strabala calculated the hit for a $250,000 residential property: $42 a year per bond, or $84 a year combined, for ten years — and commercial property owners will pay considerably more.
Strabala noted a pattern worth flagging for conservative voters: Vail, Sahuarita, and Tanque Verde are among the reddest districts in the county, meaning these override requests land disproportionately on Republican households. On the timing, his read was straightforward. "The COVID money has stopped," Strabala said, pointing to federal spending pullbacks under the current administration and the winding-down of pandemic-era funding streams. "I think they're trying to fleece the taxpayers one final time before the money spigot gets turned off."
His bottom line for listeners: scrutinize maintenance-and-operations overrides that don't have a direct line to classroom instruction, and push back on multi-decade repayment schedules for what amounts to a single budget year's shortfall.
Voter Registration Trends: The Gap Is Closing
Strabala also delivered an encouraging registration update. Nationally, he said, Democrats are leaving the party in large numbers — registering independent or Republican, with estimates running into the millions across the country. Arizona has followed that trend: the state is now R-plus-363,000 over Democrats statewide.
In Pima County specifically, Strabala reported 233,000 registered Democrats to 179,000 registered Republicans and 222,000 independents — a Democrat advantage that has shrunk from roughly 50,000 to around 53,000 depending on the specific count, but which both hosts agreed represents real movement in the right direction after having been closer to a 50,000-plus gap previously. In LD17, Republicans hold roughly a 13,000-voter registration advantage.
Strabala's closing reminder: October 5th is the last day to register to vote in Arizona, and he urged listeners not to wait. For LD17 voters, his recommendation was straightforward — Christopher King for state Senate, and incumbent Rachel Jones Keschel alongside John Winchester for the two House seats — "both are good candidates," he said, "and we need to elect all three and keep our Arizona legislature red." Strabala is also running a series of public ballot-measure tutorials this week, open to anyone, not just Election Integrity Commission members.
Lydia Hernandez: A Democrat Fighting Her Own Party Over School Safety
The most striking conversation of the day came from Representative Lydia Hernandez, a Democrat representing LD24 on Phoenix's west side — the Maryvale area — who has partnered with Senate President and Attorney General candidate Warren Petersen on school safety legislation, and who has been openly targeted by her own party for it.
Hernandez's bill, House Bill 4109, sought to hold school districts accountable for failing to follow Arizona Department of Education public safety plans — the protocols requiring coordination with local law enforcement, clear communication procedures, and adherence to the state's notification requirements when a crisis unfolds on campus. The bill was personal. On August 19, 2025, 16-year-old Michael Montoya II was fatally stabbed inside a classroom at Maryvale High School during an altercation with another student, later identified as Chris Aguilar, who allegedly brought a four-inch folding pocketknife onto campus. Montoya bled to death at the scene. Aguilar was also injured but survived. He has pleaded not guilty and was offered — but has not accepted — a plea deal that would reduce the charge from first-degree to second-degree murder, carrying a 20-to-25-year sentence instead of a potential life sentence.
Hernandez lives blocks from the high school and learned something was wrong only when she noticed helicopters overhead. The school, she said, didn't notify parents in a timely way, despite a legal requirement to do so. "There's a mandatory reporting piece of this," Hernandez said, "meaning did staff members know that girls" — referring more broadly to the pattern of schools sitting on safety information — "and continue to allow" the danger to persist without alerting families.
The school also had metal detectors, but Hernandez said they'd effectively been "desensitized" — in place for show rather than function, which is how a folding knife made it into a classroom in the first place. "Having the metal detectors was more theater than it was for security," she said.
HB4109 originally sought felony-level accountability for districts that knowingly and intentionally ignored safety protocols in a way that contributed to a student's death. Facing opposition from the superintendents' association and the Arizona Education Association, Hernandez scaled the language back to a class one misdemeanor — the highest tier available — while preserving the "knowingly and intentionally" standard, which exempts honest mistakes or human error. Even that watered-down version stalled. Hernandez said her own governor, Katie Hobbs, was prepared to veto the bill, and Senate Democratic leadership worked against it before it could reach a final vote. "My own governor did not care enough about our kids," Hernandez said, referring to Montoya specifically.
That setback pushed Hernandez toward Warren Petersen, and the two have since convened stakeholder meetings with families across the state — from the East Valley to Paradise Valley to Peoria — who've dealt with school violence or safety failures. She pointed to former Peoria board president Heather Brooks, who was censured and lost her leadership role after pushing to pursue allegations of sexual assault within her district, as an example of the broader pattern of school leadership punishing accountability efforts rather than supporting them.
Hernandez has paid a political price for the stance. Arizona State Senator Annalise Ortiz — publicly, on a Cartwright Education Association channel — wrote that opponents were "halfway done with our job of taking Lydia Hernandez out of power." Hernandez, who also serves as president of the Cartwright School Board (an elementary feeder district into Phoenix Union), said the same senator endorsed her primary challengers this cycle — candidates Hernandez noted have never served on a governing board — after what Hernandez described as broken promises on the very open-meeting-law accountability issues Hernandez has pushed. She also said her office and her adult daughter, who briefly ran for a board seat before withdrawing amid what Hernandez called a fabricated accusation involving a weapon, were targeted by opponents tied to the same political network. Hernandez's daughter has since filed to run for Phoenix City Council District 4.
Hernandez was blunt about Attorney General Kris Mayes as well, saying Mayes has been "way out of bounds" and has failed to deliver on a promised office to hold school boards accountable for open-meeting-law violations — the same kind of violations Hernandez says she personally documented and helped clean up after taking over as Cartwright board president in January, inheriting a district administration she described as badly overstaffed relative to comparable districts like Mesa Unified.
Hernandez, notably, does not soften her critique of her own party. She described Governor Hobbs as having issued more than 400 vetoes, including on bipartisan measures both parties had agreed on — "that's an abuse of power," Hernandez said. And on the current AG: "Chris Mayes is way out of bounds on so many things. Not just in this issue, but everything else."
Her closing message was less about partisanship than persistence. Despite losing her party's institutional support, Hernandez said she has no intention of stepping back from the accountability push, noting that safety in schools "is not a Republican or Democrat or independent issue" — a rare point of genuine common ground offered by a Democratic officeholder currently at war with her own party's leadership. Hernandez is on the November ballot for her Cartwright School Board seat and continues to serve as the LD24 representative.