Former school bus driver who impregnated 14-year-old girl sentenced to 22 years in prison

Kevin Michael Wesley/SCDC

COLUMBIA, S.C. (WOLO) —A former Berkeley County school bus driver was sentenced to 22 years in prison for criminal sexual conduct and exploitation of a 14-year-old girl.

Kevin Michael Wesley, Jr., pleaded guilty to 1st degree one count of sexual exploitation of a minor and third degree one of count of criminal sexual conduct with a minor.

During the 2014-2015 school year, Wesley was a school bus driver for Sedgefield Middle School. At some point during that school year, Wesley took an interest in an eighth grade girl who rode his bus to and from school each day.

He bought a cell phone for the child so they could have conversations when she wasn’t on his school bus, according to the S.C. Attorney General’s Office.

According to a press release, in the summer of 2015, he encouraged the then-14-year-old child to sneak out of her parents’ house in the middle of the night to visit him at his apartment so he could have sex with her.

He had sex with the 14-year-old at his apartment at least 10 times. In February of 2016, the 14-year-old girl discovered that she was pregnant.  She was afraid to tell her parents, but she did tell Wesley in several text messages that she was pregnant with his child.

Wesley continued his conversations with the victim over the course of her pregnancy through text message, and, on several occasions, asked her to send him nude and sexually explicit images.

A forensic examination of the cell phone that he gave his victim shows that he did receive many nude or sexually explicit images of the child victim. In September of 2016, the victim gave birth to her son and shortly thereafter it was discovered that Wesley had been having sex with her.