The online petition to save Darcy Marie Smith from becoming the new Mary Kay Letourneau has almost 150 names and counting. It’s called the Petition to Act as a Witness for Darcy Smith, and is tied in with a Twitter hash tag, #SaveMrsSmith. The mostly youthful crowd behind this rescue mission showed up in court last week to support the teacher who some say is like a mother to them. They’re convinced she did not have illegal sex with one of their fellow students—who says she was like a lover to him.

As the shapely 5´4˝ grade school teacher with blonde ringlets stood before a judge at the Regional Justice Center in Kent and pled not guilty to three counts of child rape, her former students and their parents from McMicken Heights Elementary in SeaTac waved signs from a glassed-off gallery. They tried to cheer on the admired educator who has been put on leave from her $65,000-a-year job.

Smith, 41, seemed unblinking and composed for someone accused of having sex with a minor over the nearly six years the boy lived in her Renton home. Now 19, he claims they began to have intercourse when he was 13 or 14, after moving into the house when he was 12 while Smith was his sixth-grade teacher. The boy’s parents approved of the live-in arrangement. After all, Smith was married with children of her own.

No one seemed aware that Smith, who would become regional Teacher of the Year during that time and be cited for “her unique and exceptional talents,” supposedly became amorous when she drank. At first she allegedly was touchy-feely and began to exchange kisses with her young roomer. The boy would later tell an investigator that, being a teen and all, he thought kissing “was cool.” Besides, he confessed, being a teen, he also had this raging-hormone problem.

As the relationship progressed, he and his live-in teacher began to have sexual intercourse after the hubby and kids went to bed, or during the day when Smith had time off, he claims. That continued until the boy moved out at age 18 a year ago.

Smith’s Seattle attorney, Brad Meryhew, says there’s more to the story, and contends that King County Sheriff investigators did not fully probe the accusations nor talk to all potential witnesses. He says Smith will be vindicated.

That’s what attorneys said in a weirdly similar case 18 years ago. Then-35-year-old Mary Kay Letourneau, like Smith, was an attractive, blonde, married-with-children grade-school teacher in the Highline District who had sex with a student from her sixth-grade class and wound up being charged with child rape.

She left her husband and four kids and, while out on bail for the rape charge, gave birth to her student/lover’s child. Letourneau received a relatively light sentence—three months in custody. But she violated parole by getting back together with her young beau, Vili Fualaau, and getting pregnant again, giving birth in prison while she did six more years.

They wed in 2005 when she was 43 and he 22. Their headline-making relationship, turning them into global celebs, was rooted in love, they insisted, and perhaps 10 years of marriage does speak to that.

But there’s an obvious difference

with the newest Highline case—Darcy Smith has said nothing about leaving her family to be with her former student. He, for reasons so far unstated, is suddenly telling all, even though she supposedly did express her devotion to him. According to county detective Marylisa Priebe-Olson, the boy said that “Smith would tell him that she loved him” and bought him a closetful of clothes. She counseled and advised him and called him “Babe” when they were alone. Up to then, his life had been troublesome, he said, and Mrs. Smith would likely keep him “on the right track.”

That led to the day she took his hand and steered him into the bedroom, he said, where he was introduced to lovemaking with Teach. As Priebe-Olson states in court papers, the boy told her “he was hormonal at the time and he wanted to do it. He said he knew it was wrong. He said there was no sex that [first] time and it went on for a few nights like that. [The boy] said they then started having vaginal sex and she gave him oral sex. He said they did not use protection.”

He guessed they had sex two to three times a week for years, and more when she had days off. He couldn’t tell anyone, though, Smith allegedly told him. If he talked, she’d go to jail.

He did, and she did. She’s now free awaiting trial. Ultimately, it will likely be jurors who will decide what she and Mary Kay Letourneau might have in common.

randerson@seattleweekly.com

Rick Anderson writes about sex, crime, money, and politics, which tend to be the same thing. His latest book is Floating Feet: Irregular Dispatches From the Emerald City.