Final Arguments Heard in Suit Over Racial Taunting of Girl, 7

On a Redlands playground three years ago, the childhood rants of schoolyard bullies could have led to tragedy.

During lunch hour at Lugonia Elementary School, a black girl who was 7 at the time says she became so distressed by a barrage of racial slurs that she grabbed a jump rope and tried to hang herself from a set of monkey bars.

Now her family is suing the district for unspecified damages for allegedly failing to protect her from harassment by classmates that led to a suicide attempt. The jury is now deliberating the case.

During Thursday’s closing arguments in San Bernardino County Superior Court, the girl’s attorney accused school officials of ignoring his client’s concerns, then conspiring to cover up a suicide attempt.

“The defendants have stretched the bounds of credibility,” the girl’s attorney, Charles Hack, told the jury. “Each of them took the stand, looked you in the eye and lied to you.”

Lawyers for the Redlands Unified School District said there was no suicide attempt and accused the girl of threatening suicide as a desperate ploy to bring her divorced parents back together. When her plan did not get the intended result, she felt compelled to lie, they alleged.

“She struggles still,” said Stephen Harber, an attorney for the school district. “She can’t say a straight story because, you know why? It didn’t happen.”

He said that, other than one documented occasion when two boys called her “blacky,” school officials knew of no racially motivated taunting at the school, and that her parents never once complained to school officials.

The Times is withholding the girl’s name because of her age.

Hack said the girl’s mother met with school officials several times to discuss such harassment. At the time of the incident, the girl’s father had not lived at the family home for about three years, he said.

Hack disputed the defense’s theory that the girl acted in an attempt to reunite her parents. “If that’s the reason,” Hack said, “why didn’t she commit suicide at home?”

During a videotaped deposition last year, the girl testified that she was not trying to kill herself and that the incident occurred when one of the bullies pushed her into a rope that he had hung on the monkey bars.

That testimony is dramatically different from what she said in court this week. The girl, now 10, said classmates teased her relentlessly, using racial slurs. The taunting grew so hostile one day, she testified, that she grabbed a jump rope, tied it to a set of monkey bars, fashioned a makeshift noose and tried to hang herself.

She testified that another child called her names and said “I should die and I should hang because niggers should hang, and I said, ‘OK’ and got the jump rope.”She said she lied in last year’s deposition because she felt uncomfortable talking to lawyers she’d only just met.

On the stand this week, school officials said the girl had only threatened suicide on the playground and that they did not have any information indicating that she had actually tried to take her life. But the girl’s attorney had a former assistant principal read from a report that the school police officer had prepared before the girl was taken to a hospital. The report stated that the girl was “found on the playground, putting a rope around her neck. The kids were picking on her, joking and calling her names because of her skin color.”