Former behavioral tech at Pearland child therapy clinic accused of indecency with minor

PEARLAND, Texas (KTRK) -- Parents whose children with autism attend a speech and behavioral clinic in Pearland were informed by leadership about an employee's arrest a month after it happened.

Zachariah Barineau, 42, worked as a behavioral technician at Essential Speech and ABA Therapy.

He is charged with aggravated sexual abuse of a child and indecency with a child-sexual contact. Alvin police said the victim in the case was not a child at the clinic.

Katie Cuellar, who worked as a billing specialist at the clinic, said she answered the phone the first time when Alvin police called on June 30 looking for him. She said she included the regional director in that phone call and future calls with police.

They learned that he had a warrant out for his arrest for sexual abuse of a minor.

She doesn't believe he ever returned to work from the time of the first phone call until he was arrested on July 6.

"(The clinic) sent a letter to (Barineau), because he didn't ever show up for work letting him know that he was fired," Cuellar said.

According to her, she was presented with a confidentiality agreement by leadership at Essential Speech that prohibited her from speaking about Barineau with any parents or other employees.

"I did express to them I was not comfortable signing that paper, and then I was told that if I did not sign it, I would no longer have a job, so I signed it," Cuellar said.

Last Wednesday, Cuellar said she became upset by how the situation was being handled. Parents still had not been informed of what happened.

She submitted her resignation letter on Thursday and left the job without another one lined up.

In an email response from human resources at Essential Speech, she was reminded about the confidentiality agreement.

"We work with children that have autism, so a lot of them are not verbal. So I just felt like that was just not who I am as a person to hide that," Cuellar said.

ABC13 presented several questions to the regional director of Essential Speech concerning information from Cuellar. The company responded by saying, "Unfortunately, you have been presented with false information on this matter by this former employee. Given the nature of this misinformation, we will have to hand the matter over to our legal team to address this more directly."

A follow up email asking what specifically was false has not been answered.

In the days following Cuellar's resignation, Kristyn Lopez, whose 7-year-old son with autism attended the clinic for two years, said she was informed by another former employee about Barineau's arrest.

"(My son) was always so excited to see this therapist, and now, it's like, you know, what if he was grooming them the whole time?" Lopez asked. "We don't know. We don't know, because you don't tell us anything."

She reached out to ABC13 for help getting answers.

After ABC13 reached out to the clinic, it issued the following statement, which was also sent to parents:

"The safety, well-being, and individual growth of each of the children in our program has and will always be our top priority, and we will continue, as always, to maintain a zero-tolerance approach toward any behavior that could potentially put their well-being at risk. In addition, we remain committed to transparency and upholding the highest standards of professionalism and ethical conduct within our clinics. While our facilities are very high security with continuous surveillance throughout and no opportunities for any staff to be alone with any children without surveillance and monitoring from supervisors, support staff, and administrators, we take staff incidents outside of our workplace just as seriously so as to never put our children at risk now or in the future.

We conduct regular background checks for all staff for this reason, and this former employee was background checked as recently as June 2023. When informed of the former employee's charges by the local sheriff's office in July 2023, we were told it was an incident with a minor and despite inquiring about the incident, no further details were provided. Despite the limited information, we made the decision to terminate the employee effective immediately. We have attempted since then to get more concrete information from the sheriff's office on the outside incident to avoid reporting inaccurate or misleading information to parents and other staff and, as of now, we have not been directly informed of the allegations against them. We pride ourselves on our safety measures for our children and are very thankful to our excellent leadership team for continuing to keep our children safe by taking swift action in this case while further investigation is conducted on the outside incident in question."

Lopez and other parents did not feel like the response was adequate.

About 10 parents met with the regional director, who Cuellar said she included in the calls, on Monday morning.

Lopez felt as though the concern was more about business than the children.

"He was just like, 'We didn't have protocol,'" Lopez recalled. "'We didn't know what to do.'"

Even knowing the child was not a member of the clinic, Lopez is still extremely upset.

"To still have a person like that work with our children is still very scary and very, very frustrating," she said.

Alvin police said they have not gotten any information about additional victims since the news became public, but they encouraged parents whose children worked with Barineau to speak with them.

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