Former principal at Mead High School alleges ‘unhealthy culture’ in football program during hazing lawsuit

Playing Mead football was almost fulfilling a generational prophecy for one of the high schoolers assaulted and hazed at a 2023 football camp at Eastern Washington University.

The now-17-year-old’s mom went to Mead High School, and two uncles played for the Panthers; he was happy to follow their lead. As a toddler, his family would recreate the breakaway banners athletes bust through at the start of the game for the future player to do the same.

He “had a smile you wouldn’t forget,” the victim’s uncle said.

“You couldn’t get it off his face when he was a young kid,” he said.

The victim and his family told a jury on Monday of his trauma after Mead teammates pinned him down and assaulted him with a battery-powered massage gun in a hazing attack that his attorney, Marcus Sweetser, argued was racially motivated.

In the years since the June 2023 attack, that smile is hard to come by, family said.

“I lost whatever type of faith, whatever amount of trust I had in people,” the victim said. “I don’t trust anyone.”

The victim, who is Black, is one of two former Mead High School students Sweetser is representing in the suit against the school district for failing to report the assaults and protect its students.

Spokane County Superior Court Judge Annette Plese already ruled the district is liable, and it’s up to the jury to determine damages. Sweetser is asking for $20 million to $50 million for his clients.

On the second of a three-day football training camp, the student-athlete described teammates barging into the dorm room at Eastern Washington University, where the camp is hosted. He tried to hold them off as they pinned him to the bed, forcibly applying the massage gun to his privates.

Teammates recorded video of the assault, where it spread around the Mead community for months before the district filed a report or launched an investigation.

The other of Sweetser’s clients is white and was assaulted after standing up for his Black teammates, Sweetser said. Both victims were sophomores at the time of the attack and later transferred from Mead High School.

The victim told the jury on Monday about how much racism permeated Mead. His teammates regularly used slurs like the N-word in its unabbreviated form around him and his coaches, who he said wouldn’t correct his peers. More than once, he said he’d been called a “monkey” by teammates who said he “needed to be put on a leash.”

“Those types of remarks were ongoing; it wasn’t just at camp, it was 24/7. It was normalized, regular use in conversations …” he said. “They would use terms like ‘Kool-Aid,’ ‘fried chicken,’ ‘monkeys,’ making us feel less like a person.”

The victim described feeling targeted leading up to the attack. Just before the football camp, he used another player’s water bottle without his permission. That student got mad, and the victim overheard a peer saying, “We’ll get him back at camp,” he recalled.

The victim could feel eyes on him during the weekend of the attack, he said, like his teammates were “plotting.” A group of upperclassmen tried to get a key to his room from his roommate.

“I just had this feeling as soon as they saw me,” he said.

The group of upperclassman athletes tracked the victim down in his friend’s dorm, where they assaulted him with the massage gun. One student wore a mask, and some chanted “sacrifice” during the assault, the victim said.

Afterward, the victim said he was left feeling “dead.”

“Before that day, my life was light; I could feel the sun,” he said. “Since then, it’s been hard to find that again. To find myself, to bring that character that they took out, what they took from me.”

Friends and family of the victim told the jury how drastically he’d changed after June 2023 and their frustrations at not being able to pinpoint why. He told no one of the assault for nearly eight months after it happened, scared of social retaliation and believing what happened to be “normal,” he said.

It wasn’t until the next February that school staff notified his family of the assault when the district launched an investigation into the incident. Mead Superintendent Travis Hanson removed references to racial discrimination in that report, he previously testified.

Because of the emotional trauma from the attack, the victim moved to Texas with his uncle and mother for his final years of high school. There, he earned “almost all As,” he said, and all-star awards for football. A recent graduate, he’s bound for university in Texas, where he will play football.

In the years since the attack, the victim said it made him more “robotic,” he said. He blames his larger-than-life personality for making him a target, and now thinks through every word before he speaks.

Before the attack, he took for granted “not caring about my next sentence. Not caring about what people might think of me if I start randomly dancing or something,” he said.

“I miss who I was.”

‘Unhealthy culture’ in Mead football

In her deposition, former Mead High School Principal Kimberly Jensen said football coach Keith Stamps and athletic director John Barrington kept the extent of the incident from her for months. It’s evidence of the “unhealthy culture” in the football program, she said.

In December, the pair told her another parent had seen a video of the assault, showing what they described as “boys roughhousing in a dorm room,” she said, and downplayed the incident as an altercation.

In the following month, Jensen asked to see the video on seven separate occasions from either Stamps or Barrington. They were “incredulous” at the implication hazing or racism could be present in their program, Jensen said. They continued to push back against Jensen after she told them to report the incident to the district’s software system while they were reluctant to tell parents.

“I said, ‘We need to make it right what didn’t happen last summer,’ ” Jensen said.

It wasn’t until a meeting with another parent that Jensen realized the severity of the assaults. That parent described the videos he’d seen, including the sexual assault.

“That’s when I responded, ‘This is nothing that I’ve heard before,’ ” she said.

Barrington, who was at the meeting with the parent, was “immediately defensive” and accused the parent of lying, Jensen said.

She continued to implore Stamps and Barrington to send the videos, to which Stamps replied, “The last time a principal looked into the football program, they got fired,” Jensen said.

“If it keeps kids safe, let them fire me,” Jensen said.

Jensen said she notified Hanson that day of the severity of the incident, who went on to launch the investigation a month after learning of it.

If she knew students assaulted the victims, she would have notified parents immediately, she said.

Speaking as a principal who has launched several investigations into bullying, Jensen said it’s common to see victimized teenagers reluctant to speak up for fear of retaliation.

It’s especially difficult for male students to address sexual assault, facing a stigma that they’re “weak,” she said, both for being assaulted and for reporting it. Add in the racial component, that the victim was one of around 20 Black students at Mead High School, and she sees even more opportunity for social isolation.

“Social retaliation for teens is particularly hard because their identity is connected to their social groups,” she said. “Especially in high school, once students don’t feel like they belong to something anymore, they don’t know who they belong to.”