This is the third legal challenge against Denver Public Schools in connection to their efforts to relax discipline policies in the name of racial equity.
The family of a Denver student who was gunned down last year in his high school’s parking lot has filed a wrongful-death lawsuit accusing district leaders of failing to maintain a safe environment, in part by removing school-resource officers from their campuses.
The lawsuit, filed last week by the estate of 16-year-old Luis Garcia, is at least the third legal challenge against Denver Public Schools and its far-left school board in just over a year in connection to their efforts to relax student-discipline policies in the name of racial equity and ending the “school-to-prison pipeline” for minority students.
Concerned parents and community members say the school board’s moves have led to deteriorating safety conditions and increased violence in Denver schools. District leaders have been accused of retaliating against vocal opponents of their efforts to keep violent students out of jail and in public-school classrooms.
Luis Garcia, an East High School junior and a member of the school’s state champion soccer team, was fatally shot on the afternoon of February 13, 2023, while he was sitting in his black Honda Accord in the school’s parking. Another teen driving a stolen Kia Sportage drove into his path and opened fire, shooting Luis in the head, according to the lawsuit.
Luis died in the hospital a little over two weeks later. A year-and-a-half later, Denver’s soft-on-crime district attorney, Beth McCann, has not filed criminal charges in the case.
In addition to targeting the suspected teen shooter and his mother, the wrongful-death suit filed in Denver County District Court alleges that leaders of East High, the school district, and the school board breached their “duty to maintain a safe environment” for students.
The defendants “subverted and weakened the security and safe environment of the school by removing all professionally trained and armed School Resource Officers,” the lawsuit states. By doing so, they undermined “the deterrent effect of having an armed” officer in the school, and allowed “potential shooters to believe they would be able to execute an attack without armed or other formal law enforcement resistance.”
Matthew Barringer, the lawyer representing the Garcia family, told National Review that a school-resource officer could have made a direct difference in Luis’s case.
“Where he was shot, there would have been an SRO that would have been parked roughly 50 yards from where the shooting occurred,” he said.
Barringer said their investigation has found that at the time of the shooting, guns were “rampant” at East High. “It is our understanding, the gun that was used in that shooting was in East High School that day,” he said.
Denver Public Schools was among the districts around the country that ended their school-resource-officer programs in 2020 in the wake of the George Floyd racial-justice riots.
Auon-tai Anderson, one of the Denver school board’s more radical members at the time, said that getting rid of school-resource officers was about “dismantling a system that has held children of color down for far too long.” The effort was a priority for Padres y Jóvenes Unidos, a far-left Denver group that was part of the national police-free schools movement.
In addition to getting rid of the school-based officers, Denver’s school board also updated its so-called discipline matrix, making it harder to expel dangerous students and placing new limits on when school officials could call the police.
The relaxed discipline measures were followed by deteriorating safety conditions in some schools. About five months before Luis Garcia was shot and killed, a 14-year-old East High student was shot in the mouth near the school. He survived.
After Luis was killed, district officials had debates about gun violence and the board urged state lawmakers to pass gun-control legislation. But then-board member Anderson insisted that school-resource officers wouldn’t be returning.
It wasn’t until about a month later, after two East High school administrators were shot by a violent 17-year-old student they were tasked with patting down, that district leaders seriously started to reconsider their stance on school police. The board eventually voted to reinstitute the school-resource-officer program.
“Let’s be clear, when Luis was shot, it was ‘Hey, let’s talk about gun violence,’” Barringer said, calling it a valid topic for discussion but adding that “having a debate about gun violence does not make East High School any safer.”
“The fact is,” he said, “it wasn’t until those two deans were shot that they went, ‘Oh, maybe we should put SROs back in on a more permanent basis.’”
Speaking at a press conference in May 2023, Luis Garcia’s family members placed some of the blame for his killing on school officials. Santos Garcia, Luis’s father, said in Spanish that district leaders were protecting students who engaged in crimes, but asked “who is taking care of our kids, the kids that go to school, that work, that actually do sports, the good kids?” Luis’s brother said the “adults in charge” failed Luis.
Luis’s family members weren’t the only ones expressing concerns. Last summer, the district fired a popular middle-school principal, Kurt Dennis, after he expressed concerns about school violence during TV news interview. The district had denied Dennis’s request to expel one of his middle-school students who faced a charge of attempted first-degree murder, and accused Dennis of trying to keep a “young student of color” out of his school.
Board members smeared Dennis as a racist. The district said he was fired for divulging confidential information about the criminally-charged student to the TV reporter.
Dennis sued Denver Public Schools leaders in federal court last summer.
In August, a parent, Kristen Fry, sued four current and former board members, alleging that they conspired with a far-left political activist to retaliate against her for speaking out in favor of Dennis and against the district’s discipline policies. The activist, Hashim Coates — a political ally of several current and former board members— falsely accused Fry of physically assaulting him and calling him a racial slur during a school-board meeting.
Fry’s lawsuit claims that some school-board members tried to make an example out of her, and to send the message “to other members of the community that they could be next if they did not get on board with the defendants’ policies.”
Barringer said that parents like Fry who raised concerns about violence in Denver schools “were just dismissed” as being “part of the old guard that just wants to target, in their words, brown and black students.”
“And that’s the irony of all this,” he said, “the kid who got murdered was Luis Garcia.”