Yes, Son’s Slaying Is Tragic; Mother’s Lawsuit May Be Too

And you wonder why school officials sometimes act as if they’re scared of their own shadows?

Get too involved in the affairs of their students, and parents accuse them of meddling or exerting too much influence.

Don’t get involved enough and get sued when something goes horribly wrong.

If you think I’m overdramatizing, consider the lawsuit filed 10 days ago by the mother of 14-year-old Carl Dan Claes, shot to death a year ago in what detectives say was a plan by other boys to steal his expensive sound system.

The sheer gruesomeness of the crime speaks for itself. Claes, an eighth-grader in the Tustin Unified School District, was shot three times in the head after being taken to a secluded spot in the Lemon Heights area, a few miles from the Tustin home of his grandfather, with whom he lived.

Two boys, one 16 and the other 17 at the time of the incident, are scheduled to stand trial Sept. 9 on murder charges. Police theorized the assailants shot Claes because they wanted to keep the sound equipment he had loaned them several days earlier. Five other teens or young men already have been sentenced for being accessories after the fact.

Danella George is Carl Dan’s mother. She worked for the U.S. Forest Service and was living in Northern California when her son was killed. She has been quoted previously as saying Claes was going to join her when the school term ended.

In the civil suit she filed this month, George asks for unspecified damages against the parents of the boys charged in the killing, claiming they should be held responsible for their sons’ actions.

She also is suing the school district for unspecified damages. From my perspective, this is where things get sticky.

George asserts that the district knew her son had attention deficit hyperactive disorder and had a “special duty” to him to provide aids and services.

The district failed in that duty, the suit alleges, by not adequately advising his teachers he had the disorder and not adequately training school personnel to deal with it.

Beyond that, though, the suit alleges that the district, “despite obtaining specific knowledge that [Claes] was starting to associate with known bad and criminal juveniles, and despite knowing that [the disorder] caused a child with that condition to be more gullible, negligently failed to undertake any action to prevent this association, including failing to advise [Claes’] legal guardian of the association so he could undertake some action, even though [the guardian] was on campus meeting with teachers just days before [Claes’] being shot and dying.”

The suit says Claes told a teacher a few days before his death that he feared for his life and that a number of boys were “out to get him.” The teacher didn’t pass that information to Claes’ grandfather when he came to school for a conference the very next day, the suit alleges, preventing his grandfather from taking protective action.

The suit alleges that “as a direct and proximate cause of [the district’s] breaches of the above duties, [Claes] was shot and murdered . . . by one of those very same kids whom he feared.”

That is a ferocious charge to levy against a teacher or school district.

I suppose we’ll have to wait for a trial to find out exactly what Claes told his teacher. The suit doesn’t use any direct quotations from Claes other than his saying the boys were “out to get him.” I wonder how many times a teacher has heard that from students.

But let’s back up a second. The suit says the district knew Claes’ condition made him “more gullible” and, therefore, it should have been more protective of his associations.

Is that the school district’s responsibility? How does a teacher measure what “more gullible” means? Are teachers responsible for keeping junior high students from mingling with the wrong crowd? How do they enforce that? And if that is the case, why didn’t George sue her father for not being more watchful of her son? Or, for that matter, sue herself for the same reasons?

Harsh sounding, I know, but after the slaying, Danella George made it sound like she had the same information her son’s teachers had. “I know he talked about rough kids in the community,” she was quoted as saying the week after the killing. “There were fears he expressed to me, and he was glad to be getting out of Tustin . . . “

For my money, it’s a lot to ask that a teacher automatically link whatever Claes said to a murder plot. Tragically, Claes was prescient. But can we reasonably expect a teacher to suspect murder or mayhem was in the offing? If I were the teacher, I’d probably assume young Carl Dan had voiced the same concern to his grandfather or mother, which he apparently did.

In hindsight, if I’m the teacher, I wish I had mentioned Carl Dan’s fear to his grandfather.

But is the school district legally liable because I did not?

If the answer is yes, this is a good time to get out of the education business.

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Dana Parsons’ columns appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.