TRENTON, N.J. (Legal Newsline) – Transportation companies and a New Jersey board of education will face a lawsuit over the sexual assault of a 17-year-old female who tricked her driver into not dropping her at home.
Trial court victories for Orange Board of Education, K&H Transport and Sussex County Regional Transportation Cooperative were overturned by a Nov. 12 decision by the New Jersey Superior Court Appellate Division.
The decision reverses summary judgment for those defendants, who will now have to prove they aren’t liable for the rape of a then-17-year-old female identified as Stephanie in court documents.
“The difficult question on this record is not the existence of the duty but its scope,” Judge Allison Accurso wrote.
“Specifically, whether unwanted sexual contact, by young men from whom she willingly accepted a ride, was a risk reasonably within the range of apprehension of injury Stephanie might suffer from being dropped off unsupervised somewhere other than her home.”
The trial judge called the events surrounding the lawsuit “bizarre” and “attenuated” and could not have been predicted by the defendants.
On April 2, 2014, Stephanie left Palisades Academy in a van. She was a special needs student with cerebal palsy who functioned more like a sixth- or seventh-grader. Palisades was out of her school district but is a State-approved school for students with disabilities.
She made a call on a cell phone and told her driver her mom said it was OK to drop her off at a cemetery near their apartment. The driver did not call Stephanie’s mother to verify, even though she had her number. She sent a text to the mother after dropping Stephanie off.
Instead, Stephanie was making plans to meet a boy named Stefon at a park. Meanwhile, Stephanie’s mom discovered the driver’s text and reported her daughter missing. She tracked down Stefon’s number, and he told Stephanie her mom was looking for her and she should go home.
But she called another boy to come get her. Before that could happen, a car with three young men offered a ride, and Stephanie got in. She recognized one of the boys.
They took her to a house, where she had consensual sex with one of them. But two of them then sexually assaulted her and took pictures of her naked.
The search for her continued, and an Amber alert was issued. The boys took her to another house, where three boys and one of their uncles raped her. One of them, named Steve, had her stay in his car at school the next morning but noticed the Amber alert. He drove her somewhere and kicked her out of the car.
The daughter of the owner of a store recognized her from the Amber alert and called the police. No charges were brought against the boys and man who raped her.
An expert for the plaintiffs says the bus company failed to develop procedures and policies to ensure the health and safety of the students it transported. It faults it for dropping her off at a location not approved by her school district or Sussex County Regional Transportation Cooperative, which hired the bus company.
The Orange Board of Education, the district in which Stephanie lives, failed to provide specific information about her needs and disabilities, the plaintiffs also argue.
But the defendants noted that Stephanie was allowed to leave school at lunch to get something to eat at KFC or Papa John’s and that she testified that she still could have met Stefon if she had been dropped at home.
Judge Accurso wrote, “This is not an easy case.”
“There is too little that is undisputed in this record about Stephanie's condition to allow the court to have determined, as a matter of law, the scope of the duty owed to her, and specifically, whether her sexual assault was a risk reasonably within the range of apprehension of injury she might suffer from being dropped off at the cemetery, blocks from the designated bus stop directly outside her door,” Accurso added.
“Because the scope of the duty owed to Stephanie is impacted by the extent of her disability, and the facts necessary to that determination were vigorously contested, summary judgment was inappropriate on this record.”