"We didn't see age anymore. ... In my mind he quit being a teenage boy. ... To me, he was a man," Peterson has said in an interview recorded for ABC's Good Morning America.
On Tuesday, the 26-year-old was sentenced to six years in federal prison and five years of supervised release after she gets out. She had pleaded guilty in July to a charge of transporting a minor across state lines to have sex.
Peterson was the boy's sixth-grade math teacher at Lexington Middle School during the 2005-06 school year. They started having sex in November 2006, according to court documents.
The pair disappeared in October 2007, soon after the district's superintendent confronted Peterson about allegations of an inappropriate relationship with the boy.
She was arrested a week later in Mexicali, Mexico, after the boy made a cell phone call to his family.
Peterson was once a student at the middle school in the south-central Nebraska town of Lexington.
"I had a lot of kids who knew they could trust me," she said as she described the beginnings of her relationship with the then 12-year-old boy.
"Something drew me to him," she said.
She also thought to herself, "I can change this guy."
Peterson said her actions were wildly out of line what she said was her upbringing in a Christian household. She had expected to grow up and get married, she said, then have children and live in a house with a picket fence.
"I made choice after choice after choice that didn't allow that," Peterson said.
In a separate interview, her attorney, James Martin Davis, blamed the boy.
"She didn't initiate this relationship - that young man did," Davis said.
Peterson said she remembered the first day the boy kissed her: "I was shocked.
"We got to the point where age didn't matter," she said, denying any perverse interests.
"It's not like I chased little boys or liked younger men. ... It was him. I loved him, or I thought I loved him."
