White football players at a high school in Spokane, Washington targeted their Black teammates for racial harassment and sexual assaults that were tantamount to gang rape, and school officials who knew about it did nothing to rein in their behavior for several months, a new lawsuit contends.
Four Black former Mead High School football players and their parents are suing the Mead School District for failing to intervene in a football program that “created and tolerated an environment of assaults, sexual assaults, racial discrimination, threats, bullying and harassment” over a two-year period, according to the complaint filed last week in Spokane County Superior Court.
The lawsuit says two of the Black players were sexually assaulted by white teammates at mandatory overnight football camps run by the school at Eastern Washington University over the summers of 2022 and 2023. A white player who tried to protect his teammate was also assaulted. The attacks were videotaped and widely shared on social media.
In June of 2022, a group of white football players allegedly grabbed a Black teammate, “a star athlete” with a high GPA, from his room, “carried him down two flights of stairs, passed at least one football coach, stripped him down to his underwear, violently pried his legs apart, pinned him down while he struggled, and assaulted his genitals and anus with a battery-powered oscillating massage gun.”
After the assault, the boy left the dormitory and walked to his sister’s house a mile away. No coaches attempted to locate him or contact his parents, the complaint says. He returned to the camp the next morning and asked to leave the camp. Over the ensuing months, players widely shared videos of his assault, including with the sons of the school’s football coaches, mocking and humiliating him.
Traumatized, the Black student transferred out of the school district. Neither the school nor the football coaches ever investigated, the lawsuit says.
A year later, at the same camp, a group of white players allegedly let it be known that they were targeting younger Black players for the same treatment, a hazing ritual they dubbed “the sacrifice.” One of the Black athletes who learned that he was their first target told coaching staff that the players intended to “torment and rape” him.
The lawsuit contends the coaches ignored his concerns, and did not intervene when a group of older white players pushed their way into the Black boy’s barricaded dorm room, and sexually assaulted him with the massage gun in the same violent manner, noting that one of the white players who held him down was 6 feet 6 and 285 pounds.
On videos the Black student can be heard screaming during the attack. The lawsuit alleges that the other players were also yelling and that the assault created a loud commotion, but that chaperoning staff “were either absent or decided to do nothing.”
At practice the next day, the assailants openly mocked the Black student, saying, “Look, the monkey is quiet now, maybe we should do that to him more often,” the complaint says.
The next evening the same group of white players “set out to find their next victim,” another Black player, according to the complaint. Unable to find him, they demanded that his friend, a white player, reveal his whereabouts. When he refused, the white student, a sophomore, was surrounded by a scrum of white players who forced his legs open and inserted the massage gun between his genitals and anus, while cheering and recording the incident.
“A price must be paid” as “punishment,” said one of the masked players during the assault, according to the separate complaint of the white player, who is also suing the Mead School District.
In its answer filed in September to the legal complaint of the white student, the school district said that when he was interviewed by a coach, the student said the incident “was not a big deal” and “we were just messing around” and “I am good.”
The student’s attorney, Marcus Sweetser, told Atlanta Black Star that characterization of his client’s experience of the assault is “inaccurate” and that the boy was “traumatized” by both the assault and ongoing taunting and harassment he faced from his assailants throughout the school year.
Within two weeks of the camp, on July 5, 2023, a parent sent an email including two Snapchat videos of the assault of the white student to Mead’s athletics director, John Barrington, expressly stating that it showed players using a massage gun to assault the player at the football camp, says the lawsuit of the white player, filed in July. The email noted that a second student had also been assaulted at the camp.
None of the alleged sexual assaults of the Black or white students was immediately reported to school administrators, law enforcement, or the state Department of Children, Youth and Families as required by both school policy and state law, the lawsuits claim. Nor were the parents of the alleged victims informed.
Instead, Barrington, and head football coach Keith Stamps, decided to “informally talk to select players,” meetings which did not include all of the alleged victims and witnesses that were known to them. At a team barbecue, the lawsuit says, Stamps chided the players about potential negative impacts of social media on their college career prospects. He then concluded that no deeper investigation was necessary.
As a result, “the discriminatory environment escalated,” the lawsuit says, and Black students at Mead High School were subjected to intense discrimination, harassment and bullying over the next several months by the white players, who were “emboldened by the impunity.”
Three of the Black football players were allegedly called racial epithets including the N-word, “monkeys,” “chocolate praying mantis,” and “dirty Q-tip,” and told “they need to be ‘leashed.’” Later, when the videos were widely circulated and more details about the incidents went public, Black players were called “snitches” and told that “Blacks squeal.”
One of the Black students, a quarterback, said he was threatened by two offensive lineman who said that they wouldn’t block for him during the upcoming season and would let opposing players come through to sack him.
In August of 2023, a parent emailed Stamps that her son had heard some senior boys bragging during lunch at the EWU camp that they had pinned down a Black player and used “a massage gun on his privates.” Further, her son had told her that one of the coaches knew about the assault and, according to her email, had “told the boys, ‘in our day we used a stick. You guys have gone soft.’”
In October of 2023, a Black football player was allegedly assaulted by several of the white camp assailants in the boys’ locker room at school. The white students, who were naked, carried the Black player, who was clothed, into a running shower. One of the white students “attempted to sexually humiliate” him by “placing his penis on [the Black player]’s head.”
In November of 2023, at a football banquet, a mother of a football player reported the assaults and confronted Stamps about the school’s lack of response. In December, she met with Stamps and showed him videos from the camp, calling them “borderline sexual assault.” A nurse, the woman advised the coach that in her work “she has seen kids jump off bridges over things like this,” the lawsuit says.
Three days later, Stamps and Barrington met with Mead High School Principal Kimberly Jensen. According to her notes, Barrington stated he “wouldn’t say it rose to the level of hazing.” It was “boys being boys,” he said. They discussed notifying the victims’ parents about the reported incidents, but then did not, the complaint says.
Meanwhile, as Black students continued to endure hostile and racist harassment from white students at Mead High School throughout the fall, the complaint says school officials sat on multiple accounts of the alleged assaults from parents, in ongoing violation of their duties as mandatory reporters of sexual abuse.
In January of 2024, the father of a football player emailed Jensen and Barrington asking to discuss the “multiyear hazing that has occurred on the football team,” mentioning that one boy “got raped by a massage gun” and explaining that he was “fearful” for his son who would not attend the upcoming football camp.
According to the complaint, Jensen wrote in her notes at that time, “If this had been a girl involved we’d call it gang rape.”
Jensen then requested the videos, and the school initiated an investigation. In late February, parents of the students were finally informed their children had been assaulted eight months earlier.
Parents of one of the players assaulted and others who had witnessed the assaults were interviewed, as were the accused students. Some parents reportedly told school and district officials of the ongoing racial discrimination and harassment their students had faced since the camp, and that they did not feel safe.
All four students who had undergone the abuse withdrew from in-person classes, while their alleged assailants remained at the school.
The complaint says the school district failed to develop a safety plan for the students after learning about the alleged assaults and harassment, despite the urging of their parents.
By spring, all four students were suffering “severe mental health consequences.” One of the Black students was observed researching how to commit suicide on a school-issued computer, the lawsuit claims. Later they all transferred to other schools.
In March, Mead High School’s resource officer, Deputy Mitchell Othmer submitted gross misdemeanor fourth-degree assault charges related to the assaults for five students to the Spokane County prosecutor’s office, reported The Spokesman-Review.
Per state law, the prosecutor’s office did not charge the defendants with assault, but referred them to a diversion program because they had no criminal history and because the charges were gross misdemeanors. Such diversion programs require defendants to perform community service, to undergo counseling and other options outside the criminal justice system.
In May, the school district issued a letter to parents summarizing its investigation of the “serious incidents” at the football camp, during which “a significant number of student/athletes took part (both directly and indirectly) in inappropriate and offensive behavior that involved elements of hazing, including intimidation and targeted harassment.”
Because “details about what happened came in bits and pieces” over a long period of time, the letter said, “ultimately the severity of what took place last summer was fully realized” months later. It noted that analysis of the videos showed the first victim appeared to be assaulted with the gun in his “privates area” for about six seconds, and said the student told investigators he had not been penetrated. It said the gun was pressed against the private areas of the second victim for about 11 seconds.
The report said “it was difficult to determine what was happening aside from ‘horseplay and/or roughhousing,’ but acknowledged “each of the incidents may represent sexual harassment assault.”
The letter said “Mead’s football program seeks to mold and shape young men … who buy into the team concept and who treat others with dignity and respect. What took place at team camp violated those values and building administrators dealt with conduct violations in accordance with Mead’s policies and procedures related to student misconduct.”
Prior to the start of the football season this year, four of the white football players were initially barred from participating in or attending several games, but after they appealed, that suspension was later reduced to fewer games, according to Sweetser.
That meant that the white student plaintiff in the lawsuit, who now played football at Mead’s rival high school in the district, would have to play against his former alleged assailants. In September, when Mead School District officials refused to bar those four students from playing at the request of the alleged victim’s parents, his attorneys sought and won a court order to require it.
In her order, Spokane County Superior Court Judge Annette Plese wrote, “allowing the victim’s assailants to confront him at the upcoming football game will create an unsafe environment and cause additional trauma to [the plaintiff]. …Protecting the wellbeing and safety of a sexual assault victim takes precedence over the considerations presented by the Defendant Mead School District.”
Sweetser, who represents two of the Black students and the white student, told Atlanta Black Star that Mead school officials have “left these boys who experienced sexual assault to cope on their own without the supports that should have been in place for them” for more than a year now, “which makes their ongoing process of coping complicated. They could be required to testify. They’ve already been traumatized, humiliated and betrayed.”
Of his clients, he said, “One day they were just wanting to be part of a team, play sports, have a normal childhood,” and now “their high school experience has been thrown into total chaos. And for these boys to see some of the statements by the school district in an attempt to … cover their ass by downplaying this incident as ‘horseplay’ or ‘boys being boys’ … it’s an ongoing betrayal. It’s a violation of their hope and trust that the adults in charge of school-sponsored programs that they just want to participate in as kids will do the right thing and follow the law. That’s been shattered, for them and their families.”
The lawsuit claims that the Mead School District was negligent in failing to supervise students and to ensure the safety of the student plaintiffs from foreseeable harms, failing to inform the parents of both the plaintiffs and the alleged perpetrators, and preventing both from intervening or taking steps to protect their children from additional harm.
It charges the district with discrimination on the basis of race and gender, permitting a hostile environment and failing to intervene in ongoing racial discrimination under state discrimination laws.
It also says the district violated the Washington Equal Education Opportunity Law by failing to properly investigate multiple incidents of assault and discrimination, ignoring its mandatory reporting duties and showing “deliberate indifference” to the plaintiffs, who were damaged physically and mentally and suffered impacts on their education.
The suit seeks a jury trial with general and special monetary damages, legal costs, and a ruling to deter similar conduct harming students in the future.
Mead School District Superintendent Travis Hanson wrote in a statement released on Nov. 12 that Mead does not tolerate discriminatory harassment in its schools.
“We are aware of the lawsuit that has been filed and take these allegations seriously,” Hanson wrote. “As this matter is now in litigation, we will not be commenting publicly about the numerous inaccuracies in the lawsuit or on the specifics of the case. Our attorney has asked that we allow the facts to come forward in the context of the litigation. We recognize that litigation can be an inherently difficult process for all participants. The district does not want to make the process more difficult for the involved students or their families by debating this matter publicly. Any further comments will be at the discretion of the attorneys representing the district.”
