The parents of Kendrick Castillo, the student killed in the 2019 shooting at STEM School Highlands Ranch, have refused to accept a $387,000 payout from the school as they push to make more information about the attack public.
Maria and John Castillo, whose 18-year-old son was hailed as a hero for rushing one of the shooters, have not accepted the settlement money in a civil lawsuit they brought against STEM School, their attorney, Dan Caplis, said Monday.
The parents hope refusing the funds will help them in a fight with the school over releasing more information about the May 7, 2019, school shooting that also injured eight others.
The two STEM students who attacked the school were convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
Douglas County District Court Judge Jeffrey Holmes in February ordered STEM to pay the Castillos the maximum amount of monetary damages allowed under state law, in particular the Claire Davis School Safety Act. After the damages were paid, the lawsuit against the school would be dismissed as moot because the maximum damages were awarded, Holmes ruled.
But the Castillos don’t want the lawsuit to be dismissed, court filings show. The parents want the information they learned during the discovery process to be made public. They also want to bring the case to a jury, which could find the school failed to protect their son. (The school’s settlement payment on its own is not an admission of liability.)
“John and Maria Castillo have succeeded in using the Claire Davis School Safety Act to find the truth about what led up to the mass shooting at STEM that their son Kendrick sacrificed his life to stop,” Caplis said in a statement. “Now the Castillos want to share that evidence with the public so that all schools can learn the lessons from the STEM shooting and be safer moving forward.”
The case is the first high-profile lawsuit to be filed under the Claire Davis School Safety Act, which was passed by legislators after a fatal shooting at Arapahoe High School in 2013. The law allows parents to sue if a school fails to provide “reasonable care” to protect students and employees from violence that is considered “reasonably foreseeable.”
STEM is fighting the release of some material, court records show. The school’s director of communications, Nicole Bostel, said the school doesn’t want to see the information released because of concerns about student privacy and school safety.
“We’ve never wanted to fight the Castillos in any form or fashion,” she said. “What we want to do right now is just protect student privacy. There is a lot more information in the documentation they have about other students that they got through discovery, and that is what we want to protect. Those students were not involved in what happened on May 7 and it’s not right that that information be made public.”
She said the school also doesn’t want information on current security measures to be made public. Caplis said that across 20 depositions and thousands of pages of documents, the lawsuit uncovered information that the Castillos believe “will shock the conscience of the public and will force urgently needed school safety changes” if the material is released.
Holmes in February appointed a special master — a retired judge — to the lawsuit who will be responsible for reviewing the disputed materials and determining what will be made public. The two sides will appear before the special master for the first time on Wednesday, Caplis said.
Regardless of the special master’s decision, the Castillos also plan to eventually appeal Holmes’ ruling that the school pay the money and the case be dismissed, Caplis said. The parents hope to win the right to a jury trial through that appeal.
An attorney for STEM, David Jones, did not immediately return a request for comment Monday. The Castillos initially sued both STEM and the Douglas County School District, but the school district was later dismissed as a defendant, court records show.
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