MEAD, Wash. — A second lawsuit has been filed against the Mead School District.
KREM 2 News first told you last year about allegations of a Mead High School football player being assaulted by fellow teammates.
According to newly filed court documents, four more players have come forward claiming they were also victims of targeted, racial harassment.
The two attorneys handling this case say the Mead School District failed to protect these kids.
According to court documents, black students were repeatedly targeted by fellow teammates because of their race, suffering “lifelong consequences” because they claimed the district failed in its duty to protect them.
"The right thing to do when you get a report of sexual assault at a school-sponsored event is to inform the parents," Marcus Sweetser, one of the lawyers on the case, said. "The worst thing that Mead can do is bury the events [and] not investigate, even though they're getting explicit detail and video by email to their coaches, which only leads to a pervasive culture where this can happen again. And indeed, that's exactly what happened."
It all stems from an incident recorded on a cell phone video from a football summer training camp in June 2023.
According to court documents, a black student was pinned down with his “legs violently pried apart,” further being subjected to “an assault with a battery-powered massage gun.”
The claim continues by saying, "It happened to multiple students..." and that over the coming months, several black students “endured intimidation and routine racial slurs,” including the n-word, being called "monkeys" that "should be leashed," and "snitches."
The lawsuit said multiple concerned parents reported what was happening to the Mead High School head football coach, but documents state that "the situation worsened."
One player reportedly said "One of the coaches knew about the assault," but ignored their mandatory reporting duties. Instead, the student claims the coach told them, "they'd gone soft," and that "back in his day, they used a stick."
Court documents claim Mead coaches and district leaders failed to report the incidents, despite their duty as mandatory reporters, and “made no attempts to ensure the safety of the victims.”
"Our clients, [they] trusted the school district," Colin Prince, another lawyer representing two alleged victims in this case, said. "They're deeply involved in the community, and to find out that they were betrayed in this manner, that the school district didn't even inform them what was going on is incredibly serious, and it should be a concern to everyone in the community."
The lawsuit claims the Mead High School principal wrote in her investigation notes that the incident was being downplayed because the victims were boys, writing, "If this had been a girl, we'd call it gang rape."
"Clearly within the district's internal documents, they were aware of how serious the conduct was that they needed to investigate," Sweetser said. "They needed to inform the parents about and the families that we represent feel incredibly betrayed that publicly they could cast this as horseplay and just boys being boys when their own internal documents indicate exactly the seriousness of the offenses they were seeing on video."
"This isn't how the school district should react," Prince said. "This isn't how the people that are entrusted with our kids should react. They're not even following their own policies."
It wasn't until eight months after this incident that district officials notified parents that their kids had potentially been assaulted.
KREM 2 did reach out to the Mead School District on Monday for comment but did not hear back.
This is the second lawsuit filed against Mead School District. The first was by another student who he said was also targeted by members of the football team for speaking up against the harassment.