Hollywood school took 8 hours to find teen overdose victim in bathroom, mother’s lawsuit alleges
Melanie Ramos was missing for eight hours before she was found dead of suspected fentanyl poisoning in a Hollywood school bathroom this year, the 15-year-old’s mother and her lawyers said Wednesday in announcing a lawsuit against the Los Angeles Unified School District.
The wrongful-death and negligence lawsuit filed on behalf of Elena Perez, Melanie’s mother, alleges school officials knew illicit narcotics were prevalent at Helen Bernstein High but took no action.
“Kids would be buying and selling and using drugs in the bathroom at Bernstein, and administrators on campus did nothing about it,” attorney Michael Carrillo said. “They knew because there were six prior calls to Bernstein High School for potential drug overdoses in 2022 alone. Six prior. How do you not make any changes to protect kids?”
District officials said in a statement that “Los Angeles Unified does not comment on pending or ongoing litigation. However, the safety and well-being of our students and employees remains our top priority.”
Fentanyl deaths among teens more than doubled from 2019 to 2020, increasing from 253 to 680. Last year, the number jumped to 884, according to a report from the Journal of the American Medical Assn.
Melanie was found dead Sept. 13 by the father of another student, the suit alleges. It was about 8:30 p.m., eight hours after Perez alleges a school administrator called her to inform her Melanie was missing from class, according to the lawsuit filed Monday.
Staffers at Bernstein High “did not look for [Melanie] despite pleas from Perez … to look for her daughter,” according to the lawsuit, which alleged that “delayed life-saving medical treatment.”
LAPD Chief Michel Moore said Melanie ingested a pill she thought was Percocet but probably contained fentanyl. A detailed autopsy is still pending, including a breakdown of what was consumed and how long Melanie had been dead.
Melanie and her 15-year-old friend both overdosed during the incident. The friend’s stepfather found Melanie in the girls’ bathroom that evening. She was pronounced dead at the scene by paramedics; her friend was hospitalized.
L.A. Unified has said the stepfather was accompanied by a school employee when he found his unconscious daughter and Melanie.
“It took hours for them to find my niece,” Melanie’s aunt, Gladys Manriques, said during Wednesday’s news conference. “Where was the staff? Where [were] the teachers? Where was the administration? If it wasn’t for the other [girl’s] parent, then my niece wouldn’t have been found until maybe the next day. That’s why we want justice.”
Perez, Melanie’s mother, later said she eventually learned about the horrific fate of her daughter from LAPD officers early the next morning.
The family of Melanie Ramos, the 15-year-old Helen Bernstein High School student who died Tuesday of a possible fentanyl overdose, wants to warn other parents of the dangers of drug use.
After Melanie’s death, the Los Angeles Police Department announced the arrest of a 15-year-old boy suspected of selling the drug to the two students at Bernstein as well as a 16-year-old boy suspected of peddling drugs to another student at nearby Lexington Park.
Moore said both juveniles were students at APEX Academy charter school, located on Bernstein High School’s campus.
Last month, L.A. schools Supt. Alberto Carvalho said at least 16 students in the district had overdosed on or off campus since the beginning of the school year, including 13 involving fentanyl.
A 15-year-old student from STEM Academy of Hollywood — located on the Bernstein campus — was found unconscious at home in September, and a 17-year-old Bernstein student was hospitalized in October after school staffers found him unresponsive.
Before Melanie’s death, school officials had been repeatedly alerted to a problem with drug overdoses on the Bernstein campus, the lawsuit alleges.
In May, staffers called the Los Angeles Fire Department three times in response to student overdoses. The next month, a parent complained to the school about the overdoses, expressing safety concerns for her child, and requested more security for the students and school bathrooms. Then, a few weeks before Melanie’s death, a parent told administrators “that her son was missing even though he had gone to campus that day,” but that complaint was ignored, according to the lawsuit.
Melanie’s family has called for those responsible for distributing the drugs to be held accountable and for enhanced security measures on campus, especially during after-school activities.
“I’m angry that these kids had got ahold of these pills and decided to distribute them at school knowing what this can do to somebody…. There’s somebody connected to them and somebody who hired them,” Manriques said. “I think we deserve to be informed. I think they can do better on that. We have a million questions that haven’t been answered.”
L.A. schools Supt. Carvalho and Police Chief Moore reach for strategies to prevent more overdose deaths on and off school grounds.
The LAPD’s high-intensity drug task force has been assigned to investigate the case, and Moore has said he hopes that other victims of overdoses will come forward and cooperate with law enforcement.
But lawyers for Perez said those promises are too late for Melanie.
“Defendants did not do bathroom sweeps to look for students selling or using drugs and did not adequately supervise decedent Ramos as is required by state law,” the lawsuit alleges.
Luis Carrillo, a veteran schools misconduct litigator and another of the mother’s attorneys, said, “How long was little Melanie dying on that bathroom floor, desperately clinging to life, hoping for help?”
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