The girl on the school bus: Pike Road school board faces lawsuit over 2019 sexual assault
On Oct. 23, 2019, a 14-year-old girl sat down on the school bus to Pike Road High School, just like she had nearly every morning for the last two months. The only difference that Wednesday was that she had a new seatmate, a boy who was two years above her in school and lived down the street.
She had just started talking to him over Snapchat a week and a half earlier, and on that Wednesday, the boy asked the friend who usually accompanied her on the bus ride if he could take her seat. The friend said yes.
After he moved onto the bus seat, the 16-year-old boy stretched his arm across the girl’s throat, adjusted his backpack to shield them from the view of others on the bus and began sexually assaulting her. The girl said she told him to stop, but he didn’t.
Similar assaults would occur the next two mornings in a row on the school bus.
“It was almost like a – and I hate to say – It was almost like two dogs fighting and one gets the other one down. And, you know, and she – she gave up,” former Pike Road High School Principal David Sikes said in a deposition.
No one else noticed or did anything to stop it until the third day when the bus driver intervened and relocated the boy to another seat.
Security cameras on the school bus recorded all three assaults, and on Oct. 25, Sikes and other school administrators reviewed the footage before calling the police and guardians of the two students.
Now, four years later, Lashundra Rogers is engaged in a Title IX lawsuit against the Pike Road Board of Education over the way school leaders handled the aftermath of her daughter’s sexual assault. The Montgomery Advertiser reviewed over 100 pages of legal documents in order to fully understand what happened to that 14-year-old girl on the school bus.
Because the girl and boy were both minors at the time of the incidents, the Montgomery Advertiser is not naming them. Instead, both people will be referred to by the pseudonyms used in ongoing litigation. The girl goes by the initials AB, and the boy goes by the initials SH.
Consequences of his actions
That Friday afternoon, after the bus driver reported the incident, administrators pulled SH out of class. Sikes said SH told him that he thought a woman would “enjoy being choked.”
An officer from the Montgomery County Sheriff's Office reviewed the security footage of the assaults and proceeded to place SH under arrest. According to school administrators' depositions, the officer walked SH out of the building around the time school ended at 3:10 p.m., and students watched as the boy got into the sheriff’s car.
The Pike Road Board of Education said school officials conducted an investigation that resulted in “swift, certain and conclusive” action.
Pike Road administrators expelled SH, and he was ultimately convicted on sexual abuse charges in Montgomery County Juvenile Court. According to Alabama Code, Section 13A-6-66, a person commits sexual abuse in the first degree if he or she subjects another person to sexual contact by forcible compulsion, and it is a Class C felony.
“The Board’s actions evidenced anything but indifference to the misconduct in question,” a motion from the Pike Road Board of Education stated.
‘Just inappropriate touching’
The clock struck 3 p.m. right around the time that Lashundra Rogers’ phone rang on Oct. 25. When she answered, someone from her daughter’s high school was on the other end telling her that something happened to AB and she would not be able to ride the bus home that day.
Rogers and her husband, Keith Gamble, showed up at Pike Road High School shortly thereafter, where they met with officials from the Alabama Department of Human Resources, the Montgomery County Sheriff's Office and the school.
According to court documents, then-Principal Sikes, Assistant Principal Turkessia McGaskill and Assistant Principal Terina Gantt were the school officials who interacted with AB’s parents.
“They kept talking about inappropriate touching. That was it, no further details,” Rogers said in a deposition.
Gamble recalls being told that “a young man was bothering her” and “trying to make her have sex with him.” When he learned that there was security footage of the assault, Gamble asked to see it, but school officials would not let him.
The sheriff’s deputy instructed the family to go to Child Protect, an advocacy center in downtown Montgomery “where there would be people more equipped to talk to a child about what happened to her,” according to Rogers' testimony.
Before leaving, Rogers remembers asking Assistant Principal McGaskill if AB needed to go to the hospital for an examination. Rogers said McGaskill told her, “No, ma’am, it was just inappropriate touching.”
McGaskill said in a deposition that she did not remember AB’s mom asking her about the hospital.
Nearly a year would pass before Rogers and Gamble would know the full extent of what happened to their daughter over the course of those three days. Gamble said in a deposition that they did not know that their daughter had been digitally penetrated during the assault until an assistant district attorney showed them a video of the incident in September of 2020, prior to SH's conviction. Rogers said that was also the first time she learned that SH choked her daughter on the bus, which was evident in the video.
When anyone asked AB about what happened to her, even months later, Rogers said she would simply say she didn’t want to talk about it, and tears would slowly stream down her face.
AB’s return to school and road to healing
AB stayed in her bed all weekend after the final assault on Friday, according to her mother, but she didn’t take any time off from school. The next Monday morning, she got dressed for the day and jumped on the school bus like she would have done any other school day.
Once she sat down, a wave of chants from the other students came at her: “Free SH. Free SH.” She remembers staying quiet in her seat and feeling embarrassed.
When the bus reached its destination, AB said she told Assistant Principal McGaskill about the taunting, and she said there was nothing the school could do about it. According to McGaskill’s deposition, she never knew about any bullying on AB’s first day back to school, but Principal Sikes said in his deposition that McGaskill reported the harassment to him that day.
Rogers checked her daughter out of school early that day and made the decision that AB would not take the school bus again. She also decided that AB needed to start seeing a counselor.
After over a year of halfhearted sessions, the therapy did not have the desired results, and eventually, AB stopped going altogether.
She made it through the rest of her ninth grade year at Pike Road High School, but she said it wasn’t out of the ordinary for students to make mean comments to her about the assault in the hallways and the cafeteria throughout the year. She didn’t report those to the school, but she thought her mother did.
The Pike Road Board of Education denied knowledge of any continued sexual harassment directed at AB.
"The Board denies that AB’s enrollment in a different system after the 2019-20 school year was caused by the incident made the basis of the complaint or by the Board’s response to the incident," its response to the complaint read.
Since leaving Pike Road High School, AB has been taking classes online and making As, Bs and a few Cs. She’s all set to graduate in 2024, and she’s thinking about becoming a cosmetologist.
Inside the lawsuit
On behalf of her daughter, Rogers is seeking monetary damages under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which protects all people in the U.S. from discrimination based on sex in any education program or activity that receives federal financial assistance.
Rogers asserts that Pike Road Schools officials failed to take “appropriate and necessary remedial action” after they were notified that students at Pike Road High School were sexually harassing her. The complaint describes the school board’s reaction as “deliberately indifferent.”
“The sexual harassment that AB suffered was so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it denied AB the equal access to education that Title IX is designed to protect,” the complaint reads.
The Pike Road Board of Education has denied Rogers’ claims and filed a motion for summary judgment back in August.
“The Pike Road Board of Education assigns the highest priority to maintaining a safe and secure educational environment for its students. However, in deference to the student confidentiality concerns implicated by the litigation, the Board declines comment on the particular claims and allegations made in the suit,” the Pike Road Board of Education said in a statement to the Montgomery Advertiser via its attorneys.
Rogers is represented by father-daughter duo Al and Barbara Agricola of Agricola Law in Opelika. In a response to the summary judgment motion, the Agricolas claimed that the Pike Road board has failed to provide at least two pieces of important evidence, including Principal Sikes’s initial incident report and several angles of security footage from the school bus.
“Defendant has provided no information as to how Mr. Sikes’s report was lost just as it provided no information as to how it failed to produce all of the videos it acquired from the school bus video cameras on October 25, 2019, until June 13, 2023,” the response read.
At the time of publication, the judge has yet to rule on the summary judgment, and now, trial is set to begin in February.
Hadley Hitson covers children's health, education and welfare for the Montgomery Advertiser. She can be reached at hhitson@gannett.com. To support her work, subscribe to the Advertiser.
This article originally appeared on Montgomery Advertiser: Pike Road girl sexually assaulted on school bus in 2019, lawsuit reveals
