The former Myers Park High School student who is suing Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools and the city of Charlotte is scheduled to take the witness stand in federal court Thursday morning, the third day of trial.
Her suit contends that Myers Park administrators and the school resource officer, who worked for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department, violated her federal Title IX rights by failing to protect her from sexual assault and to respond to that incident after it happened.
Jurors spent most of Wednesday morning hearing from the mother of the student, who is being identified as Jane Doe. She was a 17-year-old junior on the morning of Nov. 3, 2015. That's when she left campus about 7 a.m. with an 18-year-old male student and ended up in the woods about a mile from the school.
The mother read from a series of text messages she exchanged with her daughter, in which the daughter said she had been kidnapped, asked her mother to get help and later said she had been “attacked.” When the mother asked who had attacked her, she named the male student.
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The mother, who was dropping off another child at nearby Alexander Graham Middle School, described her ongoing text exchange with her daughter, her drive to the street her daughter mentioned and her futile effort to find her. She said Jane Doe’s stepfather was at Myers Park High with School Resource Officer Bradley Leak, and she believed police were on the way to find her daughter.
When the mother was notified that Leak and Assistant Principal Anthony Perkins had found the two students and taken them to the school, she drove to Myers Park High and insisted on immediately taking her daughter to an emergency room.
Terry Wallace, a lawyer representing CMS, pressed the mother on why she wouldn’t let her daughter give a statement to Leak or Perkins, either immediately after the incident or in the following days. The mother said her first concern was getting medical care for her daughter.
Three days after the incident, she testified that she got a voicemail from Principal Mark Bosco, which she did not keep, saying he had “interesting information” and wanted to tell her the outcome of the CMS investigation. She responded by email, saying her daughter would not provide a statement to CMS and the family did not want to hear about the outcome.
Bosco emailed back “Understood.”
Wallace also noted that on the day of the incident, the mother consulted with police and contacted an attorney, but did not ask her daughter for details of the alleged kidnapping or what happened in the woods. He noted that she had immediately referred to her daughter as “a rape victim” without knowing what kind of attack she had experienced. The mother said she was afraid her daughter had been raped, but wanted to let her daughter disclose things to her voluntarily.
Wallace said the suit is based on the claim that CMS failed to investigate. “If you’re not going to allow your daughter to give a statement, that frustrates that claim,” he said.
In opening statements Tuesday, a lawyer for the city said Jane Doe had told Leak that she performed oral sex on the male student in the woods and said he had not forced or injured her but she was “uncomfortable” with the situation. Based on that, lawyer Lori Keeton said, Leak consulted with the department’s sexual assault team, who told him there was no sexual assault if there was no force used.
On Wednesday the mother described her frustration when the police department would not send an officer to the hospital to take a statement or collect evidence taken by a nurse trained to handle sexual assaults. That nurse testified Wednesday that Jane Doe told her the male student had forced her to perform oral sex on him.
The mother said she took her daughter to a mental health emergency room the next day because her daughter couldn’t sleep and was expressing suicidal thoughts, and to yet another emergency room two days after that, when her daughter complained of throat pain.
Also Wednesday, jurors heard from Dr. Sharon Cooper, a forensic pediatrician who specializes in sexual abuse of children and often serves as an expert witness in such cases. After the Jane Doe lawsuit was filed in 2018, Cooper was hired to consult with Jane Doe and her parents in 2019, four years after the incident at Myers Park High. Cooper testified that her conversations with the family and examination of medical records led her to conclude that Doe is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder because of the 2015 sexual assault and will need ongoing physical and mental health care to deal with the effects.
Doe’s lawyers also read from depositions by Bosco, and by another former Myers Park High student who sued CMS over its handling of her 2014 report of being sexually assaulted in the woods near Myers Park High. That student settled her case for $50,000.
Doe’s lead lawyer, Laura Dunn, said she will call Jane Doe as a witness Thursday morning and expects her to be the final witness for their side.
