SAN MARCOS — Two separate child sex abuse charges against a 19-year-old swim instructor will be merged into one trial in the coming months after a Superior Court judge vacated the trial for the original charge on Oct. 12.
Nicholas Piazza, 19, was scheduled to face trial in December after being charged by the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office with sexually abusing a 6-year-old child in July 2021 while working as a swim instructor at Callan Swim School in San Marcos.
While out on bail for this charge, Piazza was prohibited from working where children were present and from being in the presence of a child unless another adult was present. However, he was arrested on Sept. 29 and charged with sexually abusing another child, age 7, while offering private swim lessons in Rancho Santa Fe in September.
Piazza is currently being held in the Vista Detention Center without bail and faces two counts of lewd or lascivious acts with a child and one act of committing a felony while on bail.
Readiness hearings for both cases are scheduled to take place on Dec. 6, with a preliminary hearing likely to be scheduled soon after. Deputy District Attorney Patricia Lavermicocca said the cases cannot be combined until after a preliminary hearing.
“The hope is to resolve them together,” Lavermicocca said of the two cases.“In any child molestation case, when you have one victim, the thought for anybody is that the child is lying and that they are trying to gain something. Now you have two children who don’t know each other, saying independently that this swim instructor did something to them.”
Piazza faces a potential sentence of 18 years if convicted, Lavermicocca said.
Callan Swim School charges
Court documents related to the DA’s 2021 charge state that a six-year-old victim informed his mother he had been sexually abused by Piazza in July of 2021, saying that Piazza touched his genitals under his shorts during a swim lesson at Callan Swim School.
In early August of 2021, deputies met with swim school owner Brett Callan to inform him of the allegations against Piazza. Callan agreed to keep him out of the pool during the investigation, court documents state.
However, deputies “subsequently received information that Nicholas was back in the pool as an instructor approximately a week later,” according to court documents.
When asked about this by The Coast News, an attorney for Callan Swim School sent the following statement:
“Unfortunately, CSS cannot discuss that particular incident, given the ongoing criminal proceedings regarding Mr. Piazza. CSS would like to make it clear that it will continue to cooperate with law enforcement and that it takes all accusations of this nature very seriously,” the statement read.
A former general manager at Callan Swim School, Amy Moreno, said she was appalled by how Callan responded to the allegations surrounding Piazza. Moreno said she was disturbed when she learned about the new charges against Piazza this month.
“I found out that he had been arrested again for similar allegations while teaching privately, and I was horrified,” Moreno said. “When working at Callan Swim School, he taught approximately 80 kids a week. I think the community must know [about this] so they can talk to their children.”
According to Moreno, she was on personal leave in the summer of 2021 when Piazza committed the first case of child sexual abuse during swim lessons. When she found out about it in October 2021, upon her return, she remembered a similar allegation from 2020 that had never been reported to law enforcement, but she had kept it in the school’s files.
In this instance, according to Moreno, a child had claimed that Piazza had asked her to reach into his pants, but the parents had opted not to report the allegations to the police and instead had their child moved to a new swim instructor.
At the time, Moreno informed the assistant manager, who happened to be Piazza’s mother, and Brett Callan.
In October 2021, Moreno said she shared this information from the child’s file with the Sheriff’s Department after hearing about the new allegations against Piazza. Once Brett Callan learned about that, he told her not to return to the school, Moreno said.
Anyone whose child may have been abused by Piazza is urged to contact the Sheriff’s Child Abuse Unit at 858-285-6293. Individuals can also anonymously contact Crime Stoppers at 888-580-8477.
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