Baltimore County Police arrested a high school athletic director Thursday morning in connection with an AI-made audio clip of Pikesville High School’s principal having a fake, racist conversation.
Dazhon Darien, 31, is charged with disrupting school activities after police say he created the falsified audio recording of Eric Eiswert in January. The audio clip using Eiswert’s voice went viral and was swiftly condemned by the Baltimore County community. The school called for an increased police presence and additional counselors.
Darien’s charges are not yet listed in online court records. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The recording included offensive statements made about Black students’ test scores and Jewish parents. Eiswert was removed from the school and required a police presence at his house due to online threats. He maintained his innocence through a union spokesperson.
Baltimore County Police wrote in a 17-page charging document that Eiswert initially believed Darien, Pikesville High’s athletic director, created the fake recording because of a grievance over his contract not being renewed. Darien also fired a long-term coach without approval, Eiswert told police.
In the recording, a man’s voice sounds like he’s talking to someone named Kathy, whom listeners interpreted to be Vice Principal Kathy Albert. She told police she never had the conversation in the clip.
Three Pikesville High employees — Darien and two physical education teachers who police said were friends with him — received an email from an unfamiliar email address with the MP3 recording around 10 p.m. Jan. 16, about a half hour before the clip went viral on social media.
One of the two P.E. teachers told detectives she was having professional issues with Eiswert and was not renewing her contract to work at Pikesville High. When she received the email with the audio clip, she sent it to a student and emailed it to several media outlets, she told police. The student then “rapidly spread the message around various social media outlets and throughout the school,” police wrote.
Darien denied involvement in the recording or its release in an interview with detectives. He told detectives he was unfamiliar with the email that sent the recording to him. Over two months, detectives subpoenaed documents from Google, AT&T and T-Mobile that led to an internet provider address registered to Darien’s grandmother, police wrote in charging documents.
The recovery cell phone number associated with the Google account was registered to Darien, police wrote.The number has since been disabled. Detectives also consulted an FBI contractor and forensic analyst, who said the recording “contained traces of AI-generated content with human editing after the fact,” such as background noise for realism.
A Baltimore County Public Schools information technology employee searched Darien’s access to the BCPS network and found that he accessed OpenAI tools and Microsoft Bing Chat services that are similar to OpenAI three times between December and January 15, a day before the audio clip was released.
A second expert opinion from a forensic analyst said the recording was manipulated with multiple recordings placed together, police wrote.
Cindy Sexton, president of the Teacher’s Association of Baltimore County, which represents athletic directors, said Darien is “not in front of students” as of Thursday and the union is waiting for the criminal investigation to unfold. TABCO and the National Education Association are troubled by AI being manipulated and used against educators, she said.
“As a society, we need to get in front of and get a handle on AI because of, unfortunately, situations like this are going to continue to happen,” Sexton said. “Our students are tech-savvy; lots of people are. It opens up a whole new world of concern for all of us. We all have our voices out there.”
Eiswert had also initiated a theft investigation of Darien last year, police wrote. Darien allegedly paid his roommate and a junior varsity coach $1,910 to assistant coach the girl’s soccer team, but the roommate never did. An internal BCPS auditor confirmed that an unauthorized payment was made, in addition to a $4,420 unauthorized payment made for the roommate’s boys basketball stipend.
A BCPS spokesperson declined to comment Thursday.
