Sharon Zavaleta Chuquipa struggles to sleep within the room she shared along with her youthful sister. Each nook, ornament and toy holds devastating little reminders of the 12-year-old whose life was abruptly minimize brief.
The grief lies heavy — as does the guilt. At occasions, she says, it’s virtually an excessive amount of to bear.
“I blame myself,” she stated in Spanish, tears in her eyes. “If she hadn’t gotten concerned, she’d be right here with me.”
Feb. 17 was the day Sharon’s life modified endlessly. Her afternoon started as regular, with a bunch of bullies at Reseda Constitution Excessive Faculty harassing her as she headed to remaining interval, she stated. However issues escalated when her little sister, Khimberly, stepped in to defend her and was struck within the head with a metallic water bottle.
Khimberly underwent emergency mind surgical procedure and was positioned in a medically induced coma after being struck within the head with a metallic water bottle.
(Picture courtesy of Man David Gazi)
Khimberly was taken to Valley Presbyterian Hospital in Van Nuys, the place she was evaluated, handled and launched that very same day, in line with her household.
Three days later, main blood vessels in her mind ruptured, her household stated. She was rushed to UCLA Mattel Kids’s Hospital, the place she underwent emergency mind surgical procedure and was positioned in a medically induced coma.
It was no use. Khimberly died on Feb. 25. The county health worker has but to launch an post-mortem report with the lady’s reason behind loss of life.
The jarring tragedy has led some, together with Khimberly’s household, to query whether or not the Los Angeles Unified Faculty District might have — or ought to have — executed extra to guard the lady.
“The varsity has loads to reply for, as a result of, properly, they did nothing,” her mom, Elma Chuquipa Sanchez, stated in Spanish. “Each single day, I’d head to the college and I used to be there making a fuss [about ongoing bullying].
“However it was all for nothing,” she continued. “Now, my child is gone.”
Khimberly’s mom, Elma Chuquipa Sanchez, heart, and aunt Liz Trugman meet with a household legal professional on April 9 in Los Angeles.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Instances)
LAUSD is the second-largest faculty district within the U.S., serving about 549,000 college students at greater than 1,500 completely different websites.
College students annually are requested about their experiences with bullying, with the outcomes compiled and launched yearly as a part of the district’s Faculty Expertise Survey.
College students reply to questions on many types of bullying, together with verbal, sexual and internet-based harassment. Over the last full faculty yr, 17% of center faculty college students and 6% of highschool college students stated they agreed or strongly agreed with the assertion that that they had “been pushed, shoved, slapped, hit or kicked by somebody who wasn’t kidding round.”
The responses at Reseda Constitution Excessive have been in keeping with these of the district as an entire — 18% of center faculty college students agreed with the assertion, and 6% of highschool college students agreed.
Information from the Nationwide Heart for Schooling Statistics present that there was a long-term decline in bullying at U.S. colleges because the 2010s.
California, too, has seen all types of bullying “dropping dramatically” within the final 20 years, in line with Ron Avi Astor, a bullying professional and professor of social welfare on the UCLA Luskin Faculty of Public Affairs. A examine he co-authored discovered a 56% decline in fights at California secondary colleges from 2001 to 2019.
Khimberly’s loss of life, nevertheless, is a stark reminder of the devastating and disproportionate toll bullying can have on college students and their households.
“Faculties at the moment are extra conscious than they was, and there’s extra interventions, there’s extra packages,” Astor stated. “I believe faculty websites are very severe [about addressing bullying], as a result of it might trigger bodily hurt and sadly, on this scenario, even loss of life.”
He famous LAUSD faces extra challenges tackling the difficulty than different districts — pointing to the dimensions and variety of its pupil physique in addition to excessive charges of instructor and administrator turnover.
Tanya Ortiz Franklin, an LAUSD board member, stated that though she is unable to touch upon Khimberly’s case resulting from pending litigation, she doesn’t consider that bullying is a significant difficulty throughout the district.
“For the one household whose little one is being bullied, completely, it’s an enormous downside,” she stated. “However in the event you look within the grand scheme of half one million youngsters in a metropolis that has numerous variety that features not simply completely different cultural upbringings but additionally completely different opinions about what is true and what’s unsuitable, you may anticipate much more battle.”
Ortiz Franklin, who chairs the district’s Faculty Security and Local weather Committee, stated the very best charges of bullying and fights are seen on the center faculty degree, the place college students are nonetheless studying how to deal with adverse feelings.
She famous that the district had labored to handle this by new measures similar to a cellphone ban, which is meant not solely to extend classroom focus but additionally to foster face-to-face relationship constructing and a way of group. She additionally pointed to efforts to show social and emotional studying, so college students learn to course of adverse feelings utilizing phrases, not violence.
There have been 5,636 fights and different situations of aggression reported at L.A. Unified within the 2024-25 faculty yr and 5,707 within the prior faculty yr, in line with knowledge offered at a committee assembly in November.
Between July 1 and Nov. 6, there have been 1,786 incidents of combating and bodily aggression reported on LAUSD campuses — which interprets to a fee of 4.5 reported incidents per 1,000 college students. There have been 2,506 such incidents reported throughout the identical four-month interval in 2024, and a pair of,232 reported in that window in 2023.
These figures have been pulled from the Incident System Monitoring Accountability Report — an imprecise, however helpful, metric that tracks situations of fights, medication, threats and weapons on campus. These studies are sometimes generated by faculty directors who’ve discretion over what will get filed however can face repercussions if an unreported incident later results in issues.
General numbers and districtwide tendencies imply little to Khimberly’s household.
They are saying bullying and bodily violence are an accepted a part of the tradition at Reseda Constitution Excessive and filed a wrongful loss of life lawsuit in opposition to the district on Monday alleging that the college didn’t take studies of bullying severely. The principal didn’t reply to a request for remark, and the district spokesperson stated it can’t touch upon pending litigation.
From left, Khimberly’s sister Sharon, aunt Liz Trugman, mom Elma Chuquipa Sanchez and father Jesus Alfredo Zavaleta Tafur meet with their legal professional. The household has filed a wrongful loss of life lawsuit in opposition to the college district.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Instances)
The household’s legal professional, Robert Glassman, stated that, since taking up the case, his agency, Panish Shea Ravipudi, has been inundated with calls about bullying at LAUSD.
“Every single day, together with in the present day, we get so many calls from mother and father, primarily, but additionally from some academics saying that is such a pervasive epidemic on the district that one thing must get executed,” he stated.
Khimberly’s mother and father got here to Los Angeles from Peru 5 years in the past and enrolled their daughters in LAUSD, hoping it will result in a vibrant future for his or her daughters.
Khimberly dreamed of turning into a health care provider. She liked swimming of their house pool, using her bike, taking part in volleyball and basketball, singing and drawing.
Khimberly Zavaleta Chuquipa, 12, was born in Lima, Perú.
(Soudi Jiménez / L.A. Instances en Español)
“She was a really beautiful lady, very type, and really a lot liked by everybody,” her father, Jesus Alfredo Zavaleta Tafur, stated in Spanish. “It’s such an exquisite factor to have been her father.”
Her mom stated that the bullying of her daughters had been occurring for greater than a yr, and that she complained to the college so incessantly, officers knew her by identify. Since Khimberly’s loss of life, she stated, a number of different mother and father have come ahead to listen to and share tales of how their youngsters had been tormented on campus.
She stated the college’s lack of motion was what spurred her household to take authorized motion in opposition to the district. Six weeks earlier than the Feb. 17 incident, the identical group of scholars who attacked Sharon and Khimberly have been filmed attacking one other feminine pupil, in line with the grievance.
The household alleges that Khimberly would nonetheless be alive if the district had taken steps similar to promptly documenting and investigating studies of bullying, disciplining the scholars who beforehand bullied Khimberly and Sharon and implementing anti-bullying measures in school. The household additionally accuses the college of failing to adequately workers and monitor the hallway space the place the Feb. 17 incident passed off.
A 12-year-old pupil was arrested by the Los Angeles Police Division earlier this month on suspicion of homicide in connection to Khimberly’s loss of life. The case stays below investigation, and up to now no prices have been filed, in line with the L.A. County district legal professional’s workplace.
Chuquipa Sanchez hopes the lawsuit will lead the district to make significant adjustments so directors will take future studies of bullying severely.
“They waited till my daughter died to lastly take motion,” she stated. “It wasn’t honest that they [the bullies] continued going to high school and my daughters suffered. One needed to change colleges and we buried the opposite.”
Instances workers writers Brittny Mejia, Ruben Vives and Howard Blume contributed to this report.
