The mother of a Clayton County middle school boy is suing the school system, claiming her son was humiliated by an improper strip search for marijuana that turned up nothing.
“In the presence of the vice principal, school resource officer and three students, (the victim) was ordered to take off his pants, shirt, socks and underwear to a point where he was fully nude. Stripped naked, in the presence of school personnel and students, no contraband was found,” according to the lawsuit, filed Wednesday.
Neither the principal at Eddie White Academy in Hampton, where the boy attended school, nor officials with the Clayton school system could be reached for comment Wednesday.
Gerry Weber, attorney for Angela Dawson and her son, said it harkens a 1997 case of strip-searches in Clayton schools that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“They [Clayton County schools] have stripped kids naked before and the federal court told them it was unconstitutional. And they are doing it again. It’s like deja vu,” said Weber.
In the 1997 case, Weber also sued Clayton after an entire fifth grade class was strip searched by a teacher and security officer looking for $26 missing from a fundraiser envelope. Weber said trial and appeals courts ruled that strip searches were unconstitutional, but also that state law protected school officials from being sued at that time.
According to the lawsuit filed Wednesday, former assistant principal Tyrus McDowell and resource officer Ricky Redding first strip searched three other boys, finding marijuana.
One of those boys claimed the plaintiff’s son, who was 12 at the time, and another student also had marijuana, the suit says. As school officials went through the boy’s pants pockets and book bag, finding nothing, the accuser confessed he had lied, according to the suit.
The suit says the plaintiff’s son begged to be allowed to call his mother and to be taken to the restroom to be searched, but those requests were denied. The boy told Channel 2 Action News, a reporting partner of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, that he was scared and “didn’t know what to do. . . I didn’t know if I could say something while he was searching me. I didn’t know if I had any rights.” .
According to the complaint, the search on Feb. 8, 2011, “degraded, traumatized, embarrassed [and] humiliated” the boy. It said he “is taunted by other students for having been stripped searched and [wrongly] suspected of drug activities.”
The suit says Clayton has no policy regarding strip searches despite the earlier suit. The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages and to remove details of the search from the boy’s records.
“I can’t go back and change what happened,” Dawson told Channel 2 Action News, “but I do think that they need to have better laws [or] strict guidelines.”
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