Family Sues School For $3M After White Students Drag Their Daughter With A Rope Around Her Neck

Live Oak Classical School has been slapped with a $3 million lawsuit by the parents of a 12-year-old black girl who suffered severe rope burns on her neck during a school camping trip.

The girl, who is the only African-American in the private school, sustained the horrific injury when three white students “accidentally” placed a swing rope around her neck and dragged her to the ground.

Via NY Daily News:

“It looked like somebody had ripped her neck apart and stitched it back together,” the girl’s mother, Sandy Rougely, told The Dallas Morning News.

The girl, who was not identified, told the newspaper she had been watching her sixth-grade classmates pull the swing up and down when she felt the rope around her neck April 28. The pull rope jerked her to the ground, but three boys, who are white, told her they didn’t mean to do it.

“It was really hurting, and I just decided to reach for it to make sure it wasn’t bleeding. And then I found a piece of rope coming out of something from my neck,” the girl said. “They put Vaseline on my neck and they gave me Motrin.”

The girl and her mother had complained in the past to school officials that one of the boys was bullying her, according to the lawsuit. Rougely took her to the emergency room for treatment and later removed her from school out of concern for her safety, the lawsuit said.

The court documents also contained images of a gash running around the girl’s neck and the rope swing at the Blanco County ranch that had hosted the 25 children the previous night. The school’s handling of the situation left the girl “with scars, both emotionally and physically,” the lawsuit said.

School officials have released a statement saying they interviewed all eyewitnesses and found that the girl’s injuries were “caused accidentally” rather than the result of a “racially motivated, intentional attack.”

Watch below as the girl recalls what happened the day she was injured: