A lawsuit alleges that a convicted felon raped a 14-year-old student in Kansas City, Mo., in 2010 after the felon was allowed to pick up the student from school without authorization.
The Kansas City Star reports that suit stems from 2010, when the Lincoln College Preparatory Academy student was taken from school without authorization. A man identified in the suit as Roy Andrews is accused of taking the girl to a motel and raping her.
The lawsuit does not identify the victim, now 21, Named as defendants are Kansas City (Mo.) Public Schools, former Lincoln Middle School principal Dennis Walker and school attendance secretary Jackie Green. The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages.
Lincoln College Preparatory Academy serves grades six through 12.
According to the lawsuit, the girl was in class in early May 2010 when Roy Andrews arrived to pick her up. Andrews was known tangentially to the family, the plaintiff’s attorneys say, and because her parents were aware of his past, they would have never allowed him to pick up their daughter.
The school district’s policies and procedures required that students be released only to authorized persons, the lawsuit says, and parents had to complete a form listing all persons who were allowed to pick up their children. The girl’s mother had filled out the form at the beginning of that school year, the lawsuit says.
Even though Andrews was not on the approved list, the lawsuit contends, Green allowed him to take the girl off school premises—a direct violation of school policy.
After leaving the school grounds, the lawsuit says, Andrews drove the girl to a motel in Independence, Mo., and raped her.
Court records show that Andrews, now 51, had prior felony convictions at the time he allegedly took the girl from school.
The student left with Andrews because “she was a good little girl," says Rebecca Randles, one of the plaintiff's lawyers. “She was obedient, kind, a good student, studious, hard-working—the kind that if an adult in authority said, ‘You’re to go with him,’ she’d say, ‘OK.’ ”
The girl’s parents knew something was wrong when she returned home that day in 2010 and filed a police report, the attorneys say. At the time, prosecutors told the parents that they used the rape allegation as leverage in other cases to find him guilty.
