A second-grade teacher has been charged with performing a lewd act on a minor after an officer said he spotted her kissing a 14-year-old boy in a parked vehicle.

Kimberly Moody Alexander, 45, was arrested Thursday after police found her in a Chevrolet Tahoe with the boy on a dead-end street, authorities said Friday. The boy's name was not released.

An officer on patrol spotted the vehicle, approached and saw Alexander and the boy kissing while lying on the front seat, according to an incident report. They were not having sex, said Columbia police spokeswoman Lauren Leach.

When the officer asked Alexander how old the boy was, she said he was 16 "as far as she knew," but authorities think she knew the boy was 14, Leach said. The boy also told police he was 16, according to the report.

Karen York, a spokeswoman for Richland County School District 1, said Alexander was still employed by the district and had been a second-grade teacher at Bradley Elementary School since the 2000-01 school year. She also taught at Crane Creek Elementary School for more than a dozen years.

The boy was released to his mother's custody. Leach said Alexander knew the boy's family but would not elaborate or say if he was one of her students.

In February, a Laurens County teacher was arrested after she was accused of having sex with an 11-year-old male student at E.B. Morse Elementary school and in a Greenville parking lot.

Some members of the city's Design and Preservation Commission, which would have to approve the project, questioned its size. "I think scale is a challenge here," said commission chairman Aaron Arnett.

Croft said the building needs to have a lot of units to make it financially worthwhile because of the high price of land downtown and escalating construction costs. The nine-member panel didn't vote on the project this week.

The units would sell for $200,000 to $400,000. "It'd be nice to get something under $200,000, but I don't know if we can do that or not," Croft said.

Ten people were taken to an area hospital after a city bus was involved in a wreck this morning, a spokesman for Richland County emergency medical services said.

The wreck involving the Central Midlands Regional Transit authority bus happened about 8:30 a.m. Friday just east of the immediate downtown area.

A California congressman is continuing to push the NFL to step up its steroid testing following a report about steroid use by members of the Carolina Panthers' 2004 Super Bowl team.

In a letter faxed Thursday to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., said the NFL wrongly claimed that an Aug. 27 Charlotte Observer story about steroid use on that team provided no new pertinent information beyond what was contained in a league report on the case given to congressional investigators last fall.

"The new report by the Observer, if true, shows a deeper penetration of steroids into the NFL than the NFL report acknowledged," Waxman wrote in the letter, which The Observer reported in Friday editions.

The Observer story detailed multiple, refillable steroid prescriptions given to Panthers players by an S.C. doctor during the 2003 season, which ended with Carolina losing the Super Bowl to New England.

The Observer story relied on documents made public in a federal criminal case against Dr. James Shortt and the newspaper's own reporting to link the records to six NFL players. That group included three starting offensive lineman on the 2003 Panthers squad and two other team members.

Waxman urged Goodell, who took over as the league's new commissioner earlier this month, to reform the league's drug testing procedures and take another look at the players' involvement with Shortt.

Shortt, formerly of West Columbia, pleaded guilty in March to conspiring to illegally prescribe steroids and human growth hormone to several players. He was sentenced in July to one year and one day in prison.

Last September, then-commissioner Paul Tagliabue said the NFL had completed its internal review of the case and concluded the Panthers were not aware of the players' visits to Shortt.

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