False Story of Girl’s Death Leads to Suit

Maria J. Gonzalez says she is still haunted by the phone call that is every parent’s nightmare.

She hadn’t seen her daughter in several months. Maria Elena, 17, ran away after a family dispute last spring and had avoided contact with her mother. Then Gonzalez left for Mexico to nurse her sick father, and when she returned three weeks later, her daughter’s best friend called, crying.

“She said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me (Maria Elena) was dead?’ ” Gonzalez, 37, recalled.

As it turned out, the report of Maria Elena’s premature death was itself premature.

The friend explained that the Jordan High School newspaper, the Bulldog City Chronicle, had published an obituary with Maria Elena’s photo in the final 1993 issue.

There, on Page 6 with two other obituaries, was her daughter’s freshman identification picture with the brief words about her “death”: “Maria J. (sic) Gonzalez, born in Mexico on May 16, 1976, at the age of 16.” The obituary did not say when the girl died but said she was a victim of street violence.

Gonzalez panicked when she couldn’t immediately reach relatives who could confirm the information. She said she was in such shock that she didn’t recognize her three other children or the relatives who gathered at the house when they heard the news.

Then young Maria Elena walked in the door of their South Gate home. Gonzalez said she thought she was seeing a ghost.

“Her hands got all tangled up and she couldn’t move,” Maria Elena, now 18, said of her mother. “She kept saying, ‘It’s not her. It’s not her.’ ”

The school newspaper staff had made a mistake. A female student had died, but it wasn’t Maria Elena, who attended South Gate High School after she ran away.

Gonzalez filed a lawsuit against the Los Angeles Unified School District on March 30, alleging that the school was negligent in its supervision of the newspaper and caused “infliction of emotional distress.” Gonzalez’s attorney, John Watson, has asked the district to pay $300,000 in damages.

Jordan High School administrators wouldn’t comment on the case.