SAN JOSE — After eluding police attempts to contact her for the better part of a year, a former San Jose teacher is set to be arraigned next week on allegations she intentionally coughed on an infant in a social-distancing argument with the baby’s mother at a yogurt shop last summer, during the height of COVID-19 pandemic fears.
Nancy Nordland, 65, is scheduled to be arraigned Tuesday with the Santa Clara County Superior Court, according to court records and the district attorney’s office. She was charged with misdemeanor assault last July, but left the area soon after the June 12, 2020 dust-up at the Yogurtland off Cottle Road.
A news release issued Friday about the imminent arraignment did not specify when authorities contacted Nordland to secure her court appearance.
According to a police report and the then-1-year-old boy’s mother, Nordland was in line at the yogurt shop when she turned to them standing behind her and told them they standing too close to her. When the mother, who later identified herself to ABC7 News as Mireya Mora, pointed out that she and the baby’s stroller were at a pink line on the floor indicating the prescribed standing distance, Nordland still asked a shop employee to tell Mora to move away.
The employee stated that Mora was standing properly, but still asked Mora to move back, and Mora followed the request. The police report states that’s when Nordland “took off her mask, and coughed three times” in the baby’s face, then “went back to pouring herself yogurt.”
That was followed by other shop patrons berating Nordland, who then left without paying.
Nordland was captured on security video, and ensuing public outrage — especially amid the COVID-19 pandemic — fueled international headlines, prompted a police investigation, and led to a massive internet sleuthing effort that identified her as a special-education teacher at Alex Anderson Elementary School in South San Jose and called for her firing. In early July, before she was charged in absentia, the Oak Grove Union School District announced she was no longer working there.
In brief phone call with this news organization last August — while authorities were still trying to serve Nordland with an arrest warrant — her husband Todd Nordland said his “wife has been accused on the internet of things she did not do … she has received death threats as a consequence. Shame on you for reporting and investigating and propagating this fake news.”
For months after alleged intentional coughing, prosecutors said San Jose police had not been able to contact Nordland, who had listed residences in San Jose and Redwood City, and previously worked in Nevada. But authorities were not aggressively trying to find her either, since police don’t routinely devote resources to proactively serving misdemeanor warrants, which are typically enforced if the subject of a warrant later encounters law enforcement for another reason.
Nordland did not have a listed attorney in the Superior Court’s online records portal. The maximum penalty for her charge is six months in jail and a $1,000 fine.
