3 take plea deals in autistic student’s death at troubled Guiding Hands school
Three staffers at a now-closed El Dorado Hills school indicted in the death of a 13-year-old student with autism spectrum disorder while in their care have pleaded guilty to criminal charges in the boy’s 2018 death.
Guiding Hands school teacher Kimberly Wohlwend pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter for her role in the death of 13-year-old Max Benson of Davis.
Guiding Hands’ former site administrator, Cindy Keller, and its principal, Staranne Meyers, each pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of child endangerment, according to the El Dorado County District Attorney’s Office.
Prosecutors dropped felony involuntary manslaughter charges as part of Keller’s and Meyers’ agreements, the District Attorney’s Office said.
All three are scheduled to be sentenced June 16 in El Dorado Superior Court. Wohlwend faces as many as two years in prison; Keller and Meyers could face up to a year in jail.
El Dorado County grand jurors in 2022 indicted the three in Max’s death.
Max was a special-needs student at the now-shuttered school in El Dorado Hills on Nov. 28, 2018 when he lost consciousness after being restrained face down for nearly two hours by teacher Wohlwend and other Guiding Hands staff.
He was pronounced brain dead the next day at UC Davis Medical Center.
A civil lawsuit filed by Max’s family alleges Wohlwend and others held the boy in a prone restraint for 105 minutes after he spat at a classmate. According to the suit, paramedics were not called until nearly a half-hour after Benson lost consciousness.
The state Department of Education in 2018, said the school’s staff used “an amount of force which is not reasonable and necessary under the circumstances.” The department was also named in the civil suit along with Davis Joint Unified School District and other districts that sent students to Guiding Hands.
Keller, Meyers and Wohlwend were originally arraigned in El Dorado Superior Court on suspicion of involuntary manslaughter in the autistic Davis teen’s death in 2019. El Dorado County prosecutors took the additional step of criminally charging the school, the site of numerous state investigations before Max’s death. The three pleaded not guilty.
Guiding Hands School officially closed in January 2019. It has since been replaced by a different special education provider.
Max’s death and the so-called prone restraint Wohlwend and the other staffers used inspired legislation to ban the practice. Senate Bill 483, “Max Benson’s Law,” bars the use of prone restraints in California’s schools.
The plea deals mark the final chapter in a prolonged criminal case that had been delayed repeatedly since charges were first filed in 2019. The women had faced up to four years in prison if convicted on the original manslaughter counts.
This story was originally published May 20, 2025 at 10:22 AM.
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