WFAA-TV

The mother said her son came home with blood and feces on his clothes.

The mother of a special education student says that her son was brutally raped during a Dallas school picnic at a city park last year and that school employees failed to adequately protect or treat the young boy, according to a lawsuit.

The woman alleges in the suit that her son was attacked during the E.B. Comstock Middle School end-of-year trip at Keeton Park in Pleasant Grove on May 11, 2006.

The mother discovered her son's injuries and took him to a hospital several hours after picking him up from the school, according to the suit, which seeks unspecified damages.

"I can think of no excusable set of circumstances that would expose a 13-year-old [Down syndrome] student to a vicious rape," said J.K. Ivey, the attorney representing the family. "It just should not be possible for something like that to occur."

The school district declined to comment Tuesday.

"We haven't even been served with the lawsuit yet, so we've not had a chance to fully review it," DISD spokesman Jon Dahlander said.

In district documents, provided by Mr. Ivey, school officials say the boy showed no signs he was sexually assaulted. The first sign he may have been raped was when the mother phoned the school after her son was back home, according to written statements from school employees.

"Based on the fact that neither the nurse, [the boy] ... nor anyone else on the campus had suggested that any infraction or incident had occurred ... no reports were made," then-principal Wanda Huckaby wrote in a signed statement dated the day after the trip.

"The behavior from ... [the boy] did not point to what the mother alleged later that afternoon," Ms. Huckaby wrote. She is named in the suit along with former assistant principal Dwight Lofton and special education teachers Angela L. Parker and Melody L. Taylor.

None of the four could be reached for comment Tuesday.

Dallas Morning News policy is to not name victims of sexual assault.

Dallas police said that a possible suspect was identified in the case but that they did not have enough evidence to make an arrest.

The lawsuit accuses school officials of negligence and failure to follow district guidelines regarding supervision of special education students at off-campus field trips. That failure put the boy – who has Down syndrome, cerebral palsy and cognitive impairment – at heightened risk, the lawsuit said.

The boy was taken or lured to a public restroom at the park where he was raped, the lawsuit said. His mother took him to Children's Medical Center several hours later, where extensive internal injuries were found, the lawsuit said.

School district documents indicate signs of trouble that day, though nothing as severe as what the lawsuit alleges.

According to signed statements regarding the picnic from the teachers named in the lawsuit, the boy made several requests for toilet tissue to use at the portable toilet, indicated at one point that someone was picking on him and told Ms. Parker he hurt his knee while playing.

"I noticed that ... [the boy] was not as active on the return to school as he was earlier," Ms. Taylor said in her statement. "He did not seem tired or frustrated. He was just very subdued."

Back at school that afternoon, school nurse Treneeka Escort found the boy crying with his pants down in a bathroom stall, Ms. Escort said in a written statement. He was upset because another student was "messing with his head," she said.

The boy pulled up his pants but told Ms. Escort he could not walk well because of an ankle injury suffered in the morning during the trip. The nurse provided a wheelchair, and the school called the boy's mother to come pick him up, Ms. Escort wrote.

Less than an hour later, the mother called the school and said she thought her soon had been raped. A hospital case worker called a district police officer late that night and told him the boy had been sexually assaulted, according to the officer's incident report.

The boy's mother cried as she talked about the incident during an interview Tuesday. She said that her son is receiving therapy but that he doesn't like leaving the house and is afraid of strangers.

"He used to be very loving, but now he won't let anyone even hug him – not even us," she said in Spanish. "He has no confidence."

Staff writer Kent Fischer and Sergio Chapa of Al Día contributed to this report.