District Should Settle

Last month San Jose police arrested a De Anza College student they say was hours away from launching a meticulously planned “Columbine-style” rampage against the Cupertino community college campus. The arrest followed a tip from a drugstore photo lab clerk who became alarmed after she developed photos of the young man with guns and pipe bombs.

For calling 911 and stalling the suspect until police arrived, the photo clerk is being hailed as a hero.

Now shift scenes to Lancaster, where Kristina Tapia, then a freshman at Quartz Hill High School, told school officials that a classmate told her, “We want to kill people, we’re sick of them,” and that he later threatened to kill her for reporting his remarks. This occurred shortly after the April 1999 killings at Columbine High School in Colorado, and school officials had told students to tell authorities if they saw or heard anything suspicious. The boy was charged with making terrorist threats and intimidating a witness and ordered by a juvenile court judge to serve six months’ probation.

For doing what the school asked--for doing what the photo clerk in San Jose did--Kristina and her family are now stuck with a $40,000 legal bill.

The boy whose remarks Kristina reported and his family sued the Tapias, the Antelope Valley Union High School District and Los Angeles County for slander, invasion of privacy and false arrest.

Not every teenager who says stupid things is a potential mass murderer, obviously. But given the warnings that were missed in the Columbine massacre and other rampages, the school was right to encourage students to report anything suspicious and Kristina was right to do so. Now the school needs to do the right thing again and cover Kristina’s legal expenses.

Last month, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge dismissed the defamation complaint, saying California law shields speech in the public interest.

But it doesn’t shield Kristina and her family from the legal costs incurred in her defense.

“A pupil who cooperates as part of their responsibility as a student on a campus . . . should be immune from this type of lawsuit,” said the school district’s general counsel. “A lawsuit of this type should not even be allowed to proceed.”

But it did. And the district needs to stand up for the Tapia family in deed as well as in word.

Instead, the family has been forced to sue the school district and the county to recoup the cost of Kristina’s defense. The Antelope Valley district has the choice of either challenging the suit or settling.

Settling is not only the right thing to do, it’s the only thing to do if the school district wants students to cooperate in the future. The loss of such cooperation could carry a far higher price.