School

Lawsuit Filed In Alleged Upper St. Clair Rapes

PITTSBURGH (KDKA) ― A local school district is coming under fire for the way it handled the case of a high school student accused of sexually assaulting several female students.

Details of the case have been very sketchy because of a gag order, but KDKA is learning some new and disturbing claims about the attacker and the incidents because of a lawsuit filed in federal court.

The attorney representing an Upper St. Clair teenager and her parents filed a 35-page lawsuit naming the Upper St. Clair School District and eight administrators and teachers at the high school as defendants in the case.

The lawsuit seeks to hold the school district accountable for violations of the girl's civil rights.

The suspect, an Upper St. Clair student, was 14 years old at the time of his arrest this past February. A federal lawsuit says there were five female victims. None of them were identified, but were referred to as Jane Does one through five.

"We believe that if the Upper St. Clair School District had acted as its own policies require it to, many of these assaults would have been prevented," David Barton, an attorney for one of the plaintiffs, said.

The lawsuit uses the pseudonym "Michael Roe" when it makes references to the Upper St. Clair suspect who in March was released from Shuman Detention Center and placed under house arrest.

Barton represents the first "Jane Doe" victim and her parents.

"Contrary to its own policy, the school district suspended Roe in school and had sit in the same classroom where our client and many of the other victims actually took classes," Barton said. "The district punished Roe for these known prior assaults, by making him write apology notes."

The federal lawsuit says the first victim was assaulted at least three times starting last fall, both on and off school grounds.

She told a teacher, but the teacher allegedly took no action. In January, the same freshman student assaulted two other girls at school, followed by another sexual assault in February when the suspect took his right hand, smeared it through the victim's blood and impressed it on a stairwell wall.

A fifth girl was assaulted three days later in the same hallway area. Later that same day, the boy dragged his first victim from a bathroom through the hallway where she was again raped.

"Unfortunately, my clients have never received an apology from the school, so, I don't know why they've acted the way they have," Barton said.

The parents of the first rape victim say that the district not only failed to protect their daughter in this case, but at the same time, the district disregarded its own disciplinary policies.

We called the district tonight for reaction to the lawsuit but they never responded.

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