Autistic child’s alleged abuse covered up by Beaufort County school officials, lawyers say

This story was updated Sept. 10, 2016 to correct the district official who sent a memo about the case to members of the Beaufort County school board in February 2015.

The Beaufort County School District attempted to cover up the alleged abuse of a 4-year-old Bluffton boy by withholding dozens of video clips of the child being pinched, slapped and punched by his bus monitor, lawyers for the boy’s mother said in court this week.

The case, which began nearly two years ago, is a complex one, involving unwatched surveillance video, a missing hard drive, an apparent lack of special-needs training and conflicting depositions.

At issue is why video was not turned over to law enforcement for more than 14 months after the bus monitor’s arrest and what a school district attorney would say if a judge allows him to be deposed.

The bus monitor, Lillian Jackson, was arrested in February 2015 on one count of child neglect shortly after the child’s mother found fresh bruises on her nonverbal, autistic son and told school officials she thought the injuries occurred on his bus ride to Bluffton Elementary School, Bluffton Police have said.

The mother, who is not being identified by The Island Packet and The Beaufort Gazette to protect her son’s identity, sued the Beaufort County School District, its former contracted bus management company Durham School Services, and the Durham bus monitor, Jackson, in May 2015.

But when the school district gave police and the mother’s attorneys bus videos in the wake of Jackson’s arrest, it handed over only a portion of the footage it knew existed, plaintiff’s attorney Ronnie Crosby argued before 14th Circuit Court Judge Carmen Mullen on Thursday.

That portion included clips from around Feb. 12, 2015, the day of the reported assaults, and from an incident the mother had reported in September 2014 between her child and Jackson, which the district had requested and received from Durham at that time.

There are conflicting accounts of whether the district reported those incidents to the Bluffton Police Department, according to the police report, depositions and a district memo referenced in court.

On Sept. 22, 2014, Bluffton Elementary principal Christine Brown and assistant principal Kenyatta Frederick, who is no longer with the district, communicated via email about watching the video together, according to Brandt Horton of Charleston, an attorney for the school district. They apparently watched only a portion of video from Sept. 16 and did not view anything they considered criminal, he said.

But accounts differ 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.” Crosby said DeCrane has testified in a deposition that he never watched the videos. And in a memo to school board members, school district spokesman Jim Foster wrote that law enforcement was not notified of the September incident, according to Crosby, who works with Walterboro’s PMPED Law Firm.

However, Brown now testifies that she did ask DeCrane to weigh in on the Sept. 16, 2014 video, and that she turned all three over to law enforcement, Crosby said.

The two unwatched videos from Sept. 11 and 12 show Jackson hitting, pinching, shoving or grabbing the child more than 100 times, Crosby says.

If the district did not report known abuse or neglected to watch the videos, Crosby said he believes this would be a violation of a South Carolina law that requires schools to inform law enforcement when they have reason to believe a child has been abused or neglected.

“They didn’t turn (the other videos) over just like they didn’t take any action in September (2014),” Crosby said. “The reason they didn’t turn it over in February (2015) is because they don’t want it to come out that they didn’t meet their mandatory reporting requirement.”

It wasn’t until this past April, about 14 months after Jackson’s arrest, that attorneys for the school district announced they had found additional videos that were relevant to the case. The plaintiff received them in July. And it wasn’t until Wednesday, the day before a civil court hearing, that they delivered them to the 14th Circuit Solicitor’s Office, which passed them on to police as evidence.

In total, the videos the school district didn’t turn over show that Jackson allegedly abused the boy on at least 26 separate dates leading up to her arrest, Crosby said.

“The center of this controversy is the school district’s failure to address this abuse by Ms. Jackson in a prompt and timely fashion,” said Skip Utsey, also of PMPED Law Firm. “What has become readily apparent to us as we’ve gone through discovery in this case is there’s been an effort to cover it up.”

Horton denied that there has been any “cover up” of the abuse. He took over the district’s defense in April 2016 from Rob Whelan of Charleston, who is still representing Durham. Jackson was not involved in the hearing.

Crosby and Utsey, along with Sam Bauer and Rob Metro of Hilton Head Island, represent the mother of the victim.

They went to court this week to settle a number of issues with the defendants and received three rulings from Mullen.

▪  Mullen will order the school district and Durham to produce all relevant emails and communications that the plaintiff has requested. While Horton and Whelan said they have turned over everything they have, Mullen said the order is meant for the school district and Durham.

▪  Mullen will order Durham to search its national insurance database for the past three years for all assault-type incidents involving a bus monitor or driver on a special-needs bus. Durham’s parent company serves more than 500 school districts in the country, and they transport more than 60,000 special-needs students, according to their website. Depending on the burden of the search, Mullen will decide whether Durham must produce those reports for the plaintiff’s attorneys.

▪  Mullen will also order Drew Davis, the school district’s general counsel, to give a deposition, even though attorneys are usually protected from being deposed by law. Davis was not sworn in to practice law in South Carolina until May 18, so he must answer questions about his actions in relation to the case up until that date, Mullen ruled. He also must answer several specific questions about his role in handling the bus videos after May 18, the judge said.

Davis appeared in court for the hearing but did not speak, though attorneys for the plaintiff noted he has previously been accused of withholding evidence in an abuse case.

When Davis was a school board attorney in Winston-Salem/Forsyth County, N.C., he was suspended with pay amid questions about whether he and other school system leaders failed to promptly report possible criminal acts to local law-enforcement agencies.

Davis denied any wrongdoing and hired an attorney. Ultimately, the school board bought out Davis’ contract for nearly $50,000 in November 2010 in a mediated settlement.

School board member David Striebinger also came to court but had to leave before Mullen heard the motions at 4 p.m. It was placed on a noon roster, but Mullen heard about 20 other motions before the school district case.

No trial date has been set. If the attorneys do not settle — negotiations have already failed once — Utsey said it could take up to a week and a half to try before a jury.

The school district and Durham have declined to comment on the case.

The criminal case against Jackson is also pending, Solicitor Duffie Stone said Friday. The Seabrook woman is now charged with seven counts of child neglect and has invoked her right to remain silent, plaintiff’s attorneys said in court Thursday.

But before the case moves forward, Stone said he will get to the bottom of the months-long delay in investigators receiving additional video they had requested.

And he said he will reach out to the district to find out whether it has released all of the videos in its possession.

“I need to know that I have every piece of evidence that’s relevant to this,” Stone said. “I’m not just going to accept that, because they turned over all this stuff to the civil lawyers, they’ve turned over everything that’s applicable.”

This story was originally published September 8, 2016 at 12:01 PM with the headline "Autistic child’s alleged abuse covered up by Beaufort County school officials, lawyers say."