Family of bullied California student who died files $100 million claim against district
The Southern California middle schoolers facing manslaughter charges accused of fatally beating a classmate in September were on campus that day despite school officials’ assurances that they would be suspended for bullying and attacking the boy just days earlier.
That is among the allegations in a $100 million claim filed this week by the aunt and uncle of 13-year-old Diego Stolz against Moreno Valley Unified School District for his fatal Sept. 16 beating at the district’s Landmark Middle School. Juana and Felipe Saucedo became Diego’s guardians after Diego’s mother died in 2007. Diego’s father died in 2014. The tort claim is a precursor to a lawsuit.
Diego’s sucker-punch beating on the Moreno Valley campus and his death days later from a brain injury enraged parents, grabbed headlines and shined a new light on schoolyard bullying. The Saucedos allege the teen’s death was a needless tragedy made worse because Diego had been bullied at Landmark for a year before he died while schools officials did nothing.
“(T)he district and its school administrators failed at every turn with respect to the bullying of Diego,” read the claim, published Tuesday in the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin. “Diego died because of the inaction of school district administrators.”
The Saucedos charge their nephew might still be alive had district officials heeded their complaints about the bullying and attacks Diego endured throughout his seventh-grade year; and followed through with punishment and suspensions against the boys who attacked Diego on Sept. 12, four days before he was fatally struck.
“(The district) had the opportunity during Diego’s seventh-grade year to stop the bullying and failed to do so,” the claim reads. “And, more notably, it knew that Diego was bullied and physically punched on September 12 and also knew that the bullies intended to beat up Diego soon thereafter.”
Moreno Valley School District officials pointedly denied responsibility as well as allegations that they haven’t fully cooperated with Riverside County sheriff’s investigators. Officials called bullying a “national issue” that demands the attention of parents, students, community leaders, schools officials and law enforcement, and insisted that “keeping kids safe in schools is a high priority” in the district.
“This claim alleges the district is legally liable for Diego’s death. That is not the case,” district officials told The Bee this week in a prepared statement. “The two boys who attacked and killed Diego are responsible for this death.”
Video of Diego’s Sept. 16 attack was captured on a cellular phone and quickly went viral. It showed two boys – one, then the other – punching the teen. The video showed Diego staggered by the first blow and stumbling backward when the second boy’s punch landed knocking Diego’s head into a concrete pillar outside the school’s entrance.
Diego never regained consciousness and died little more than a week later at a Riverside County hospital.
Days earlier, Diego was punched in the chest during the Sept. 12 attack and reportedly sought out a teacher, who filed a report with the school’s assistant principal and urged her to review the school’s security footage, as alleged in the claim.
Diego and an adult relative met the next day with the assistant principal. The administrator said she learned the names of Diego’s attackers and would suspend the students for three days starting Sept. 16, and alter their schedules so they and Diego would be in different classes.
Diego returned to school Sept. 16. The boys who allegedly attacked him were there, too. They had not been suspended. Officials hadn’t reviewed the security cameras. He was attacked by the same boys that afternoon, the claim alleged.
The Saucedos in their pleading remembered Diego as a “normal 13-year-old boy” who liked soccer, music, hiking and video games. Diego was, they said, a good student with a lot of friends. He was also “like a son to them,” the claim read.
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