Man, 27, sentenced up to 120 years after enrolling in high school to prey on teens
During the fall semester in 2022, a new student came to Lincoln Northwest High School in Lincoln, Neb., as a junior transfer student. By spring, he re-emerged across town at Lincoln Southeast — a school he had graduated from in 2015.
The student known by peers as 17-year-old “Zach Hess” was really Zachary Scheich, a 26-year-old man who for more than 50 school days passed himself off as a high-schooler to befriend, exploit and, in some cases, sexually assault more than a dozen girls, some as young as 13. With a slight build and standing 5-foot-4, he fit in with the teenage students, police indicated.
Last week, Scheich was sentenced to 85 to 120 years in prison on charges of sexual assault, child enticement with electronic communication and generating sexually explicit images of children, capping a two-year saga of impersonation and sexual abuse.
Scheich, now 27, pleaded no contest in July as part of deal to reduce the number of felony counts against him from 15 to five.
Deputy Lancaster County Attorney Amber Schlote said that the harm to Scheich’s victims is immeasurable and that it has led them to miss school as well as suffer failing grades, anxiety, ridicule, shame and a deep mistrust of adults.
“It has undeniably altered their life’s trajectories,” Schlote said.
Court records state Scheich created false documents and an “elaborate backstory” to gain enrolment in the schools; the court records did not detail what backstory Scheich told administrators.
“This individual provided a birth certificate, a highschool transcript, immunization records and a physical from a clinic,” Matt Larson, then associate superintendent for educational services at Lincoln Public Schools, said at a news conference in 2023.
“Turns out, all those appear to be fraudulent. But those documents were provided — the same documents we’d require (of) any student to enrol.”
Once enrolled, Scheich began contacting girls in his classes via text and social media platforms such as Snapchat where he would flirt, solicit sexual contact, and — in some cases — send them money and persuade them to send him sexually explicit photos of themselves, according to court records.
Scheich went so far as to meet the families of some of the teenage girls before several concerned parents reported him as suspicious, prompting an investigation.