Authorities want to know how a 12-year-old girl ended up with a severe rope burn around her neck during an overnight campout with her sixth-grade classmates. Live Oak Classical School says it was an accident, but the girl and her mother believe it was a racially motivated attack.
The girl is black and attends a private school with mostly white students near a flourishing part of downtown. The mother and daughter believe the racial attack culminated after months of bullying by her classmates. They say the students pushed, kicked and made fun of her for most of this school year. Her mother exchanged emails about the issues with the school dean, Allison Buras to which she replied, the girl had a problem socializing with others; this was something that was not brought up before the bullying complaints.
According to the girl, on April 28, the first day of the campout, all the kids played with a rope swing after a day of hiking and swimming. One or two kids fit into a seat made of rope and the rest of the class pulled another rope to swing it like a pendulum in any direction.
The girl said she helped swing other kids and then she stopped to watch. She didn’t feel anything except the rope going around her neck from behind. The rope pulled against her neck. She fell to the ground and was tugged backward.
None of the students helped her, the girl said, so she removed the rope. Small pieces of rope were embedded in her neck.
She looked back and saw three boys — all of them white — who she said had been picking on her. “Guys, did you do that on purpose?” the girl said she asked them. “No. Why would we do that on purpose?” she said one of the boys responded.
But the girl told The News that she doesn’t understand how it could have been an accident. When the kids let go of the rope, it fell to the ground, she said. “That’s why I think it was on purpose,” she said, fidgeting with her hands. “I think someone tried to tie it around my neck.”
“It looked like somebody had ripped her neck apart and stitched it back together,” the girl’s mother, Sandy Rougely, said in an interview with The Dallas Morning News this week as she sat next to her daughter in their Waco apartment.
Buras did not respond to a request for comment but a member of the board of directors, Jeremy Counseller, emailed a statement to The News.
It said in part, “the student and some of her classmates were playing with a swing and an attached pull-rope on a field trip. The student received first aid treatment immediately after the accident by a parent chaperone that is also a physician, and she was able to enjoy the remainder of the field trip, which lasted through the next day. Live Oak takes the safety of its students seriously and is saddened that one of its family suffered an unfortunate accident and injury.”
The school’s statement also said: “The lawyer claimed that the student’s injuries were racially motivated, intentional attack. Live Oak takes this accusation seriously. The school interviewed all student eyewitnesses and teachers who were present and each independently established that the accusation made by the attorney is absolutely false. The injuries were caused accidentally while the students were playing with the swing and attached pull rope. The attorney was advised of the results of the interviews.”
The statement also said the attorney is trying to “exploit” the 100th anniversary “of the lynching of Jesse Washington in Waco.” The statement said the girl’s attorney, Levi McCathern, who also represents the Dallas Cowboys, asked the school to pay $2.7 million or he would make the allegations public.
McCathern and attorney T.J. Jones, who works at McCathern’s Dallas law firm, said they asked for money after the school requested a financial demand in writing.
Jones said they based the figure on living expenses plus private school through 12th grade, college for the girl and her plans to pursue a law or medical degree.
Waco police referred the case to Gillespie County authorities, but the sheriff there said officials in Blanco County, where the ranch is located, should investigate it. No one has been accused of a crime.
Source: thescoopblog.dallasnews.com
