Student suing Amphi for alleged sex abuse by teammates on bus following football game

The Amphi school district is defending itself in a lawsuit that says its employees allowed several Ironwood Ridge High School football players to sexually abuse a teammate on a bus ride back from a 2018 road game.

The lawsuit, filed in Pima County Superior Court on Aug. 10, does not specify a dollar amount. But a claim filed with the district on April 17 requested $750,000 to settle the case. A claim is a precursor to a lawsuit involving public agencies.

The Star is not naming the victim, as he was a minor at the time of the incident. The Star also does not typically name victims of sexual abuse.

On Oct. 1, 2018, the victim — a sophomore on the Nighthawks’ junior varsity football team at the time — told his mother that four nights before, several football players “stuck their fingers in his butt and put their butts on his face,” according to the Oro Valley Police Department incident report.

The victim’s mother reported the incident to Ironwood Ridge’s assistant principal, who called police the same night to file a report.

Four of the victim’s teammates were arrested and charged with misdemeanor disorderly conduct. One of the four was also charged with misdemeanor indecent exposure and another with misdemeanor assault. Their cases statuses are unclear.

The victim told police that while riding on the team bus on the way back to Tucson from an away game at Nogales High School, he “decided to lay on the floor in the aisle of the bus” and was going up and down the aisle of the bus on his back, as if he were swimming, the police report said.

Official diagnoses were redacted, but the police report indicated the victim has some social learning challenges and this type of behavior was not unusual. His mother told officers that he had previously been bullied by a few players because of his “social awkwardness” and that he craves attention from other students, whether it be good or bad.

The victim told police that while he was “swimming” down the aisle, one of his teammates jumped on him and stuck his fingers in his backside over his shorts.

The victim said that afterwards, he was held down by several teammates while another “pulled down his own shorts and put his crotch and butt in his face,” the report said.

Ironwood Ridge’s JV coach was sitting in the front of the bus at the time of the incident. The victim said his teammates stopped when the coach started to walk to the back of the bus, adding that it was “normal” for kids to poke each other that way and that he “interpreted it as horseplay.” During his interview, the victim told police that he had noticed two surveillance cameras on the bus. Police were eventually able to view a video that confirmed the victim’s story.

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The video showed one of the players exposing his genitals to “numerous students on the bus on multiple occasions,” the report said. Alerted to the camera by a teammate, the player “wags/shakes it at the camera laughing,” according to the report.

After the bus passed through the Border Patrol checkpoint on Interstate 19, the victim can be seen in the video on the floor of the bus as he described to police. One of the players can be seen kneeling over the victim’s face, pulling down his shorts and “appear to place” his genitals on the victim’s face, the report said.

“Also in the video, you can hear the roar and laughter of the crowd of students that were watching as this happened,” the police report said.

The video shows the victim roll onto his stomach, after which another player “shove(s) his fingers” into the victim’s backside in a “hard aggressive manner,” according to the report.

The players stopped and did not resume the behavior after their coach made the trip to the back of the bus and returned to his seat up front.

The victim’s mother told police that at first, her son didn’t want to report the incident, as he considered the other players his friends.

The victim’s lawyer, Tucson attorney Brian Marchetti, did not respond to the Star’s request for comment.

The district said Tuesday it doesn’t comment on pending litigation, but that the JV team was coached by a different coach the next season and the former JV coach no longer works in the Amphi district.

The district included in its response the nine-page annual training document provided to coaches by Ironwood Ridge athletic director and assistant principal Kristie Stevens, who was hired by the district at the start of the 2019-20 school year.

The document says that on buses, coaches must be “seated in places that allow them to safely supervise the students” and that “proper supervision requires that students be ‘in front of us’ at all times.”