The married Illinois special education teacher accused of molesting one of her teen students broke down in heaving sobs after learning the charges she faced, intense new bodycam footage of her arrest shows.
Christina Formella, 30, gasped for air and cried as she was placed in the back of a Downers Grove Police car on March 16, according to arrest footage published by the YouTube channel Ape Huncho.
“Oh my God. What the f–k?” Formella repeated, sobbing into her cuffed hands with her knees pulled up to her chest.
“I feel like I’m gonna throw up,” she said, and officers rushed off to find her a bag and towels in case she got sick.
Formella, a special education teacher at Downers Grove South High School, had just been detained over allegations that she molested a 15-year-old student she tutored and coached in soccer two years earlier.
The two allegedly exchanged texts professing love for one another — and talking explicitly about sex they had in a campus classroom.
“I love you sooooo much baby… Even though this morning was short, it was perfect,” Formella, who was 28 at the time, allegedly texted the boy.
Their texts were discovered days before her arrest as the boy’s mother was setting up a new phone for him — prompting him to confess the alleged relationship that he says he ended, and report it to police.
Formella was pulled over by police in her Chicago suburb as she was driving with her husband, and appeared confused when she was asked to step out of the car.
“You can just grab whatever you need,” a police officer said after confirming her identity.
“Whatever I need?” she asked, while her husband asked, “Is she going somewhere?”
“Yeah, we’re going to explain everything to you,” the officer responded, telling Formella that she was the subject of an investigation and needed to be taken to the station in handcuffs.
“I’m, like, so scared,” a clearly shocked Formella said as she was cuffed and then put in the back of a squad car.
“Is my husband coming with?” she said as the car drove off. “Am I in trouble? I am so lost right now,” she added, while officers told her they could only say she was being detained for an investigation and that she’d learn more when she got to the station.
During her interview with police, Formella claimed she was being blackmailed by her accuser — and insisted she was being targeted because she was “good-looking.”
“She claimed that one day, [the boy] had grabbed her phone unattended, had entered her passcode … had sent the message to his phone, had then deleted the message from her phone, and had saved it to his phone as blackmail,” according to court documents from her arrest.
“[Formella said] everybody comes after her because she is good looking and she is just a good person who cared too much about [the boy],” they added.
She was charged with two counts of aggravated criminal sexual assault and was released on the condition that she not enter school grounds or have contact with anybody under 18.
Formella was also placed on paid leave from her job.
Wedding photos on social media show she and her husband — who was a student athlete with her at Concordia University — were married as recently as August.
She had been teaching at Downers Grove High since 2020 and earned her teaching license in 2017.
