12-Year-Old Girl Returns From School Trip With Severe Rope Burns Around Her Neck
But the child and her mother believe they already know. The girl is
black and attends a mostly white private school near a flourishing part
of downtown. They believe she was the victim of a racially motivated
attack, the culmination of months of bullying by her classmates.
The girl and her mother said they believe some of the girl’s white
classmates intentionally placed a rope around her neck as the students
played during the camping trip.
“It looked like somebody had ripped her neck apart and stitched it back
together,” the girl’s mother, Sandy Rougely, said in an interview with
The Dallas Morning News this week as she sat next to her daughter in
their Waco apartment.
Live Oak Classical School said in a statement that the girl’s injuries
were “caused accidentally” while the students — eight girls and 14 boys —
were playing with a rope swing attached to a tree. The girl was one of
two black students on the trip.The school contends the girl’s lawyer is
using race to take advantage of an accident for financial gain.
a member of the board of directors, Jeremy Counseller, emailed a statement to The News.
It said, in part, that “the student and some of her classmates were playing with a swing and an attached pull-rope on a field trip. The student received first aid treatment immediately after the accident by a parent chaperone who is also a physician, and she was able to enjoy the remainder of the field trip, which lasted through the next day. Live Oak takes the safety of its students seriously and is saddened that one of its family suffered an unfortunate accident and injury.”
The statement said the girl’s attorney, Levi McCathern, who also
represents the Dallas Cowboys, asked the school to pay $2.7 million or
he would make the allegations public.'
The Dallas Morning News
