A nine-year-old girl’s family filed a lawsuit Friday against the Boston Public Schools alleging the girl was repeatedly assaulted and raped by another student on a Boston school bus, BOSTON25 NEWS reported.
The lawsuit claims Boston Public Schools failed to protect the girl on her trips home from school, naming the City of Boston, the Match Charter School and a Transdev driver and monitor as defendants, according to BOSTON25.
The lawsuit, filed in Suffolk Superior Court by the Morgan & Morgan law firm, claims the girl was repeatedly sexually assaulted and raped by an 11-year-old student on the bus for a seven-month period during the 2022-2023 school year, the outlet reported. (RELATED: Police Charge School Bus Driver For Allegedly Repeatedly Kidnapping, Raping Student Passenger)
The lawsuit filed Friday in Suffolk Superior Court alleges that the 9-year-old victim, a fourth-grade student at the Match Community Day Charter School in Hyde Park, was repeatedly raped and battered by another student over a 7-month period. https://t.co/gW4BQ78rO5
— Boston Herald (@bostonherald) December 15, 2023
“The sexual assaults took place just a few feet from the bus monitor and the bus driver on the ride home after school from the Match Charter Public School,” the lawsuit states.
Although Transdev requires buses to have mandatory video equipment onboard, the lawsuit alleges that an investigation discovered no video was available for any of the days of the alleged assaults, BOSTON25 reported.
The family’s attorneys allege that suffering due to fear of physical and social backlash forced the girl to drop out of school before completing the fourth grade, according to the outlet.
“Our client will experience a childhood haunted by trauma and flashbacks, and we will do everything in our power to hold the defendants accountable and prevent anything like this from happening to another child in our city,” attorneys Nina Bonelli and Alexander Zodikoff said.
Bonelli and Zodikoff allege that the Transdev bus driver and monitor “either knew, or reasonably should have known, of the repeated and ongoing sexual abuse,” and that they had a “duty to identify, intervene, and take steps to end and report the abuse as well as to take reasonable steps to prevent it from reoccurring.”
Boston Public Schools said that all buses have cameras but due to so much time passing, officials were not able to retrieve any footage of the alleged assaults, according to a statement given to BOSTON25.
“My heart breaks … for young children to be in and put at risk like that is completely unacceptable,” Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said, per BOSTON25.