L.A. Schools Ordered to Pay $1.2 Million to Molested Boy

The Los Angeles Unified School District has been ordered to pay a Hyde Park-area boy $1.2 million for psychological trauma he suffered after he was molested by an 11-year-old student in the bathroom of their elementary school, in one of the highest damage awards ever for student-on-student violence.

In a sealed verdict obtained by The Times, the jury found the district negligent on several fronts in the April 1994 incident at 59th Street School.

During a two-week trial, which ended Aug. 30, attorneys for the 8-year-old victim produced documents showing that district officials had been informed that the 11-year-old had a history of severe emotional problems, violent behavior and inappropriate sexual conduct when he transferred into the Los Angeles district seven months before the molestation, yet they did nothing to protect other students.

In fact, a month before the incidents began, the 11-year-old had been arrested on charges of molesting another young 59th Street student in nearly identical fashion. But when the boy returned to school a few days later, the principal told his teacher nothing, in violation of district rules and state law.

The incident has raised questions about the district’s ability to carry out some basic responsibilities: To assign troubled children to appropriate classrooms, to maintain a safe environment for students and to properly respond when something goes terribly wrong.

“The shame of this is that it could have been avoided,” said Thomas A. Cifarelli, an attorney representing the victim. His attacker “wasn’t some individual who wandered onto the campus. The school had complete control over both parties. They determined when it happened, where it happened and how it happened.”

The district’s handling of the case has raised concerns about the judgment of its legal advisors, who, during the trial, defended the district by heaping blame on the young victim and his family.

Among the district’s witnesses was a therapist who blamed the victim’s trauma on his mother’s inability to cope with knowledge of a sexual encounter that the therapist said might have actually been “exciting and thrilling” for her son.

Courtroom Tactics

In a tearful interview last week, the 8-year-old’s mother said she feels betrayed by school officials. She had always walked her son to and from school to protect him from neighborhood harm, she said. “And why did I do that, if the danger was in the school?”

The district has not yet decided whether to appeal the verdict, but maintains that officials did not initially realize that the 11-year-old was a threat and did their best after the first molestation report to make sure that he was never alone on campus.

“Our position . . . was basically that we were doing what we were constrained to do under the laws . . . and that we were doing the best we could under the circumstances,” said Karen Hemingway, director of the district’s insurance branch and its liaison to the private attorneys who fought the case.

Supt. Sid Thompson--who learned of the courtroom tactics from a Times reporter Wednesday--said he plans to review trial transcripts to see if the case could have been handled better. “Quite bluntly, I’m very concerned,” Thompson said. “We typically try to bend over backward for a victim.”

Long before the civil case came to trial, the 11-year-old had pleaded no contest to criminal charges of committing lewd acts on a child in the March 1994 assault and the April 1994 attacks on the 8-year-old.

Aggressive Defense

Still, the school district launched an aggressive defense against the lawsuit, which was filed by the 8-year-old’s mother last year, after the district rejected her administrative claim.

According to trial testimony, the 8-year-old told a psychologist that he had been lured into the bathroom by the older boy, who ordered him to pull his pants down and lie on the bathroom floor, then shoved up against him, hurting him. The attacks occurred several times over the next month, the boy said, but he told no one because the older boy had threatened to kill him and his family if he told.

His lawyers and his mother said that since the assaults, the victim, who is now in sixth grade, has had trouble sleeping, wakes up yelling from nightmares and is afraid to use public bathrooms.

But the district tried to prove that an 11-year-old could not physically sodomize anyone, therefore the attack was not an actual rape and the younger boy’s trauma could not have been as great as his attorneys suggested.

“The terms ‘sodomy,’ ‘rape,’ they’re designed to elicit certain emotions and outrage, but they are exaggeration,” defense attorney Katherine B. Pene told the jury in her opening statement, according to transcripts. “What [the 8-year-old] actually says is that [the older boy] came up to him on the yard and took him by the hand and led him into the bathroom. He never resisted. He never said, ‘No, I don’t want to do this.’ Never called out to anyone.”

In fact, Pene and the other private attorneys hired by the district referred frequently during the trial to the victim’s passivity, calling as witnesses teachers who described how he preferred to play with girls and shunned rougher sports for such games as hopscotch and jump-rope.

Among the defense witnesses was a Westside therapist paid $27,000 by the district to evaluate the victim, who told the jury that he might been flattered by the attention from the older child.

“It is my opinion that even terrible experiences can have certain pleasurable aspects to them,” psychiatrist Sara Latz said.

Hemingway, the district’s insurance director, said Los Angeles Unified never intended to blame the victim. “That was not our intention; that was not our philosophy,” she said.

And law ethicists said that while the defense is within legal bounds, it is morally hard to defend.

“I find it morally offensive,” said professor Erwin Chemerinsky, who teaches professional responsibility at USC’s law school. “The school [district] could certainly have said, ‘This is one of our children, we don’t want you to pursue this kind of aggressive defense.’ ”

The 59th Street School story began with the fall 1993 transfer of a very troubled 10-year-old boy from a small school system in Hope, Ark., to the giant Los Angeles Unified School District. Born to a schizophrenic mother, the child had been hospitalized in mental institutions at least three times in his short life after lashing out physically at everyone from his foster mother to his teachers and fellow students.

School Records

Admitted to Pinewood Psychiatric Hospital at age 8 after threatening to throw himself in front of a bus, he was evaluated this way by a doctor, according to Arkansas school records:

“Personality evaluation . . . appears to reflect an individual that has been physically, sexually and verbally abused all of his life. He appears to live in a world of violence, of unpredictability, where there is no stability, there is no trust. . . . He appears to be obsessed with sexuality and human body parts.”

Scattered throughout the boy’s voluminous school records from Arkansas are unsettling hints of violence and untoward sexual behavior--an allegation that he poured gasoline around his foster mother and tried to set her on fire, reports that he pulled his pants down and shook his genitalia at his third-grade classmates, and that he kicked, bit and hit his teacher.

That confidential history--including the boy’s placement in a special education program in Arkansas and his diagnosis as “seriously emotionally disturbed”--was available to Los Angeles Unified, as it would have been to any school district that accepted the boy when he moved to California.

Yet Los Angeles school officials claimed never to have received the boy’s 287-page file, and uncovered the file only after the victim’s lawyer traveled to Arkansas and unearthed a form showing that the records had been ordered by the psychologist at 59th Street School on the day the boy enrolled there.

School psychologist Mary Ann Smith said in court testimony that she never saw the Arkansas file and that even when the boy began disrupting his fifth-grade class at 59th Street, she did not seek it out.

There are special classes for severely disturbed children at 59th Street School, but the boy could not be placed in one of them without testing and assignment by the school psychologist. And though state law requires special education students to be reassessed within 30 days of entering a new school district, eight months passed before the boy’s evaluation was completed.

From the beginning at his new California school, the Arkansas boy stood out, even in a class where behavior problems were common. On his first day of class, veteran teacher Peter O’Callaghan told the jury, he realized that the fifth-grader could read only at a first-grade level and “could not do the work that other children were doing.”

In addition, he had a habit of walking out of class without permission, disappearing for up to 20 minutes at a time. And in class, he would act out in frustration, throwing his books on the floor, and slapping other students.

Five months later, in March, the boy was accused of sexually assaulting a third-grade boy in a bathroom during school hours. Police were called and the older boy was arrested, but released pending results of the district attorney’s investigation. Within days he was back at school.

Although district policy requires that “any teacher of a student who has engaged in, or is reasonably suspected to have engaged in, [violent or obscene acts] . . . be so informed,” O’Callaghan testified that he was never told of the molestation accusation.

In court testimony, Principal Harry Stovall said that he did not inform anyone that the fifth-grader had been accused of an attack because it was “a sexual case” and “I was waiting information pending the outcome of [the district attorney’s] investigation.”

He did, he said, tell O’Callaghan to assign student escorts to the boy whenever he left the classroom, and asked playground aides to patrol the bathrooms during recess.

Then, less than two months later, Stovall was told of the second series of attacks by the 8-year-old’s mother, who said that her son had told her, “I did sex . . . with a boy.”

Stovall called police, who arrested the 11-year-old again and brought the victim to the LAPD’s 77th Street Division station to take his statement. There, the 8-year-old’s mother learned that he was not the first victim.

“The police said they didn’t know why this boy was there at school, that he had done the same thing to another boy,” she recalled. “It made me really mad. I wanted to make sure it didn’t happen again.”

Meanwhile, two days after that arrest, the 11-year-old’s evaluation was finally completed by the school psychologist. She recommended that he be sent to a special private school for emotionally disturbed children because “he can be harmful to younger males if not properly supervised.”