Update (November 2, 2018): A 15-year-old girl from Waco, Texas, who suffered from a severe rope burn after classmates tied a swing around her neck has been awarded $68,000 in a lawsuit.
Blavity previously reported that the then-12-year-old was being bullied at school around the time of the assault. The students at Live Oak Classical School were on an overnight field trip when classmates tied a rope from a swing around the girl's neck and dragged her to the ground.
The Travis County court ordered the school to pay $55,000 for the girl's mental distress, $10,000 for her injuries and $3,000 to cover medical expenses. In a statement to The Associated Press, the family’s lawyer, who originally requested $12 million dollars to cover damages, said he felt that the award was still a victory.
“We were asking them to award symbolic damages to demonstrate the fact that the people of the state of Texas aren’t going to put up with that,” he shared with The New York Times.
The school’s attorney, David N. Deaconson, believes the verdict was fair, believing the incident was a mistake.
The girl was one of two Black students at the 400-student school.
Original story: The mother of a young girl in Waco, Texas is claiming her daughter was the target of a racial attack carried out by her white classmates.
The young girl, whose identity remains private, was 12 at the time of the alleged April 2016 assault. She attended Live Oak Classical School. During an overnight field trip at a local ranch, the girl claimed white peers picked on her and tied a rope around her neck.
School officials told the girl's mother, Sandy Rougely, that the rope burns from the field trip were an accident, reports the Dallas Morning News.
"It looked like somebody had ripped her neck apart and stitched it back together," Rougely previously told The Dallas Morning News.
According to The Morning News, no criminal charges were filed, and Rougely took action. She filed a $3 million lawsuit against both the school and the ranch for the incident.
Investigators claimed the burns resulted from the children playing on a swing hanging from a tree.
The Blanco County Sheriff's Office claimed the victim was playing on a swing with the other kids and helped pull on the ropes until she stopped, and it somehow went around her neck, pulling tightly and dragging her, investigators said.
Police insisted the incident was not racially motivated. However, the girl told her mother she was picked on because of her economic status.
The school sent a statement in 2016 claiming Rougely was attempting to carry out a get rich quick scheme.
She "hired a lawyer who attempted to collect a quick multi-million dollar payment by threatening that he would go to the press and claim the incident was intentional and racially motivated."
Live Oak Classical School has denied all allegations. The school's attorney, David Deaconson, believes a playground accident and nothing more caused the marks. Rougely maintains something happened to her daughter.
The lawsuit will "not only compensate the victims in this case, but to deter this type of egregious conduct from others in the future, and to serve as an example to all educational institutions that this type of behavior is unacceptable with regard to both the treatment of children and their parents," court records state.
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