Did the school district fail to report a 4-year-old autistic child’s abuse?

This story was last updated with new findings Sept. 14, 2016. To read those updates, look for the bolded entries.

This story was updated Sept. 10, 2016 to correct the district official who sent a memo to members of the Beaufort County school board, and to clarify a statement school district chief auxiliary officer Gregory McCord made to reporters in October 2014 following an incident that month involving an autistic child and a bus driver.

The alleged neglect of an autistic Bluffton boy in 2014 continued for another five months after his mother first raised concerns, attorneys said in court Sept. 8.

Now, with criminal charges and a civil lawsuit pending, attorneys are left trying to figure out whether the district could have put an end to the child’s abuse when it first surfaced.

The case went public in February 2015, when the mother of a nonverbal, autistic child complained about bruises and marks on her son and suggested he might have been hurt by his bus monitor, Lillian Jackson, on the way to Bluffton Elementary School. Police learned then that there was an incident with the same monitor in September 2014 that had gone unreported to law enforcement.

Police have since charged Jackson, who worked for bus contracting company Durham School Services, with seven counts of child neglect. And the boy’s mother has sued Jackson, the Beaufort County School District and Durham for negligence.

September 2014

▪  Sept. 11: The child’s teacher notices fingernail marks on his left arm, according to a police report filed at the time of Jackson’s arrest. Bluffton Elementary School principal Christine Brown said in a deposition she happened to overhear the teacher talking to assistant principal Kenyatta Frederick.

They decide to begin monitoring the child, who is 3 years old at the time, to determine whether he might be harming himself or is being scratched by another child or a staff member.

▪  Sept. 12: The child’s teacher notices more nail marks on the child’s arms, according to the police report. Monitoring continues. The child also sees the school nurse.

▪  Sept. 15: The child’s parents drive the boy to school. He arrives without marks on his arms.

▪  Sept. 16: The child arrives with a few nail marks on him again, prompting Brown and Frederick to suspect the bus monitor is laying her hands on the child. The child also sees the school nurse a second time.

Frederick requests bus video from Durham from Sept. 11, Sept. 12 and Sept. 16. Brown said in a deposition that Frederick may not have wanted to request video on Sept. 11 or 12 because “we didn’t want to accuse someone of doing something when they may not have done anything.”

▪  Sept. 17: Durham sends the district video from those three days. Brown watches a portion of the video from Sept. 16 and stops as soon as she sees the bus monitor touch the child in a way that concerned her, Brown said in a deposition. She also is concerned the bus monitor is seated next to the child as opposed to behind the last child on the bus, like monitors are supposed to be seated, Brown said. She did not watch the video from Sept. 11 or 12.

▪  Sept. 22: The child comes to school with additional marks.

The same day Brown and Frederick, who is no longer with the district, communicate via email about watching the video together, defense attorneys said in court Sept. 8, 2016. They apparently watched only a portion of video from Sept. 16 and did not view anything they considered criminal, the defense said.

Accounts differ now on whether Brown and Frederick showed any of the video to the school resource officer, Christopher DeCrane.

In the February police report, Frederick said “law enforcement was never notified of the incident in September of 2014.” The mother’s attorney, Ronnie Crosby, says DeCrane has testified in deposition that he never watched the videos. In a memo to school board members, school district spokesman Jim Foster writes that law enforcement was not notified of the September incident, according to Crosby.

However, Brown testified that she did ask DeCrane to weigh in on the video.

On Sept. 17 or Sept. 22, she leaves DeCrane alone in her office with the three videos, according to Brown’s testimony. She does not tell him the extent of the child’s injuries or that the child came to school with marks on three separate days. She does not show him a photograph of the scratch marks. DeCrane says he is not going to write a report because the video clip he watched does not show intent, Brown said in her deposition.

Brown notifies Durham by phone that she is concerned about Jackson putting her hands on a child and sitting incorrectly on the bus, she testified. The Durham employee says he will speak to Jackson.

Brown does not create an incident report, which she would have kept on file in her office.

Frederick and Gregory McCord, the district’s chief auxiliary services officer, watch a portion of bus video from Sept. 16, according to the plaintiff’s attorneys. Brown said she did not watch the video with Frederick and McCord.

The two videos from Sept. 11 and 12, which no one watched, show Jackson hitting, pinching, shoving or grabbing the child more than 100 times, Crosby says.

October 2014

▪  Oct. 14: The bus driver of the same route, Donna Lee Burns, is accused of striking a different autistic child as he exited the bus after school.

Footage showed the driver laying her hands on the student to block him as he reached out, apparently to scratch her. David Grissom, the district’s head of security told police, “In no way did the bus driver hit the student.”

▪  Oct. 28: Durham tells reporters that it has taken steps to change the seating of the route’s bus monitor for additional supervision and the company plans to provide refresher training to all drivers at its upcoming monthly safety meeting.

McCord tells reporters he doesn’t view such actions by a bus driver as “improper contact.”

December 2014

▪  At some point, one of the district’s special education coordinators gives a PowerPoint presentation about students with special needs to Durham bus drivers and monitors, according to Crosby.

February 2015

▪  Week of Feb. 2: The victim’s mother finds fresh bruises on her now-4-year-old son’s arm and thigh.

▪  Feb. 12: A video clip shows the bus monitor, Jackson, slapping and striking the child multiple times. Police request other clips from the same bus ride that allegedly show Jackson grabbing and bruising the boy’s thigh.

▪  Feb. 18: Jackson, who Durham has placed on leave, is arrested and charged with one count of child neglect. She gives investigators no explanation about what happened on the bus and has since invoked her right to remain silent.

▪  Later in February: Foster sends a memo to the Beaufort County school board stating that district officials had looked at video of the September incidents and determined nothing inappropriate was happening, so they had not turned it over to law enforcement at that time, Crosby said.

In a July deposition, Moss said this was inaccurate, but acknowledged there has been no effort to correct that inaccuracy with the board or to ask Foster where he got his information.

“It — obviously it’s in the email, but I would not have paid attention to that. I would have paid more attention to (the fact) that we have something that has been investigated by law enforcement, it’s going to show up in the paper, and it involves one of their employees and one of our students,” Moss said in his deposition of the alleged inaccuracy.

Other emails also allegedly show that district officials viewed later videos from the bus that were downloaded to a hard drive, Crosby said.

At some point, the hard drive was placed in a secured drawer in the office of David Grissom, the district’s protective services coordinator, according to district attorney Brandt Horton. Horton took over as the district’s attorney in April 2016 from Rob Whelan, who still represents Durham.

The hard drive was then forgotten there or lost track of for the next 14 months, Horton said.

May 2015

▪  May 5: The victim’s mother sues the district, Durham and Jackson.

▪  May 18: School district attorney Drew Davis is sworn in to practice law in South Carolina. He previously worked as a lawyer in North Carolina, and had been working as the district’s general counsel and risk manager since August 2014.

April 2016

▪  The district announces it will sever its contract with Durham, which had provided bus services to the county since 2010, to save money in the long-term.

▪  The district finds the missing hard drive from the bus, and turns it over to the school resource officer. It is not clear who found it.

Horton said he thought at the time the bus video would only include footage going back two weeks because he was unfamiliar with the district’s retention policy.

June 2016

▪  Horton now realizes the hard drive may contain more than two weeks worth of videos and discovers it holds more than two months of video, dating back to December 2014, he said. There are no earlier videos from 2014, other than the three pulled by the principal in September.

July 2016

▪ Attorneys for the plaintiff, Crosby and Skip Utsey, secure a court order for the videos. Horton said he meant to then send copies to the 14th Circuit Solicitor’s Office, police and the plaintiff, but someone in his office mistakenly never mailed them. Still, plaintiff’s attorneys receive the bus videos from December 2014 to February 2015.

August 2016

▪  The Solicitor’s Office becomes aware of the additional videos in the case, according to solicitor Duffie Stone. He has declined to say how many videos law enforcement already had possession of.

September 2016

▪  Sept. 7: The bus videos from December 2014 to February 2015 are turned over to the Solicitor’s Office and police.

▪  Sept. 8: A hearing is held in the civil case. At issue was whether the plaintiff’s attorneys can depose Davis about his role in handling the bus videos and whether the school district has turned over all relevant emails and other information.

▪  Sept. 10: Superintendent Jeff Moss writes in a statement that “At no time whatsoever has the BCSD attempted to cover up Ms. Jackson’s alleged abuse of a child.”

▪  Week of Sept. 12: Stone plans to meet with the civil attorneys to compare videos and then pursue more information from the school district about the 14-month delay. He says he is not sure whether the Solicitor’s Office now has all relevant videos from the district or not.

This story was originally published September 9, 2016 at 6:37 PM with the headline "Did the school district fail to report a 4-year-old autistic child’s abuse?."