FRESNO, Calif. (Legal Newsline) - A California school district must pay $2 million over a classroom shooting because employees failed to properly assess the threat posed by an angry student, an appeals court ruled, rejecting arguments state law grants immunity from negligence suits over mental examinations.
Holding school employees liable for violent acts by students will discourage them from fully investigating threats, Taft Union School District argued on appeal. But the Fifth Appellate District, said state law only protects people directly involved in evaluating the mental health of a student, not the larger “threat assessment team” including school administrators and police.
“Threat assessments are not comparable to a screening program that might be abandoned for fear of liability,” the court concluded in a March 25 decision by Judge Donald Franson. “Immunizing all activities related to the threat assessment would undermine the reasons for recognizing the duty to protect students and, contrary to district’s argument, is unlikely to improve the quality of threat assessments.”
Bowe Cleveland sued Taft Union after Bryan Oliver shot him in the stomach in first-period class with a 12-gauge shotgun he got from his older brother. Cleveland’s lawyers argued the 2013 shooting could have been prevented if school employees and a police officer assigned to the district had more diligently handled Oliver’s previous threats of violence.
A jury awarded Cleveland $3.8 million in damages in 2019, which was reduced to account for the school’s 54% blame. Taft Union appealed, arguing California’s Government Code section 855.6 gave government employees immunity from lawsuits over “the failure to make a physical or mental examination, or to make an adequate physical or mental examination” of someone who later causes injuries to someone else. The district also argued Cleveland failed to prove causation, or that school employees were to blame for the shooting.
The Fifth Appellate District rejected both arguments, citing trial evidence and its interpretation of California law.
Oliver was 16 when he shot Cleveland in January 2013. He had moved from Tennessee with his mother and brothers in eighth grade and since then had made multiple reports to school officials of bullying, including a 2011 fight where he told assistant principal Rona Angelo he’d been “T-bagged” during a fight. Oliver’s mother said she told Angelo that another teacher had told her son to “man up” and Angelo responded “boys will be boys.”
Things escalated on a 2012 field trip where school employees Dianne Kaszycki and Kelly Federoff overheard Oliver telling a classmate he had thought about shooting someone at school when he was in Tennessee because he was being bullied. Oliver also described bringing gasoline to school and blowing up the auditorium.
Kaszycki and Federoff filed incident reports, with Federoff recalling Oliver as saying he could shoot more than 50 students. Angelo suspended Oliver for five days for violating a rule against making threats. After that, Oliver met with a school psychologist while other students filed reports suggesting Oliver was working on a “hit list” of bullies he wanted to kill.
A police officer assigned to the school searched Oliver’s house but didn’t find any weapons or a hit list. School psychologist Mark Shoffner prepared a report rating Oliver as a “four” on a five-point scale, meaning there was insufficient evidence to arrest or hospitalize him. He was allowed to return to school under conditions including periodic searches.
In December 2012, Oliver’s older brother obtained a 12-gauge shotgun and kept it in a shared bedroom. On Jan. 9, 2013, he told classmates not to go to school the next day because something bad would happen. On Jan. 10, he brought the gun to school and shot Cleveland. After being disarmed, he said he had been picked on every day of his life and couldn’t take it anymore. He pled no contest to two counts of attempted murder and sentenced to 27 years in prison.
California law gives employees immunity only for “failure to make any examination or, if an examination is made, to the ‘adequacy’ of the examination.” The school district argued this law should immunize the entire threat assessment team, including employees who investigated the matter, saying it would encourage employees “to diligently pursue these examinations, without fear that an expert will someday tell a jury that a death or injury could have been avoided if a public employee would have just done his or her job better.”
The plaintiff argued Section 855.6 applies to examinations and nothing else, citing the word “only” in the text. He didn’t contest Oliver’s mental examination but claimed the threat assessment was negligent for failing to work together, include the school police officer in the assessment, communicate with Oliver’s mother and to collectively monitor him after the threat emerged.
Citing dictionary definitions and the legislative history behind granting immunity to mental health professionals, the appeals court decided that the phrase “mental examination of any person” should be limited to examining the “physical, emotional and mental state of the person.” This would encourage school employees to examine the mental health of students while also using tort law “to incentivize school districts and their employees to take action protecting students.”
The court also rejected the school district’s argument the plaintiff failed to prove causation. The local police chief testified, over hearsay objections from the district, that Campus Supervisor Kim Fields told him school employees said they were afraid of Oliver and had an “escape plan” if he attacked them. The jury assigned Fields 1% of the fault, but the trial court as well as the appeals court found that was enough to attribute causation to the threat response team.
Rodriguez & Associates and Esner, Chang & Boyer represented the plaintiff. Leonard C. Herr and Ron Statler of Herr Pedersen & Berglund; and Daniel P. Barer of Pollak, Vida, & Barer represented the defendants.