On Aug. 25, Austin ISD trustees voted 7-2 to turn over the “independent investigation” into the circumstances surrounding the March 28 murder of 15-year-old Ortralla Mosley at Reagan High School to private attorney Kevin Cole, who has been hired by the Texas Association of School Boards to defend the district “in anticipation” of a lawsuit by Ortralla’s mother, Carolyn Mosley Samuel. Mosley was stabbed to death in a hallway at Reagan by her former boyfriend, 16-year-old Marcus McTear; he received a 40-year determinate sentence in June and will spend a minimum of three years incarcerated in a Texas Youth Commission facility.
The board’s Monday vote derails AISD’s earlier promise to conduct not just a general inquiry into safety conditions at Reagan but also a pointed investigation into whether Mosley’s death was “reasonably foreseeable.” Trustees Cheryl Bradley and Robert Schneider declined to support the move. “We made a commitment to the community to find out all the facts independently, and it’s supposed to be out there for all to see,” Schneider said. “There’s something [about this] that lacks a little bit of integrity.”
In April, the district created the Reagan High School Safety Review Team by hiring four local attorneys and charging them with a two-pronged investigation — first to review “policies, practices and procedures” at Reagan, to determine whether violence at the school is “beyond what exists at similarly situated campuses,” and then to investigate Mosley’s death in particular. Trustees accepted the team’s report on the first charge during the Monday meeting; the team found that “violence” at Reagan is comparable to other schools, but that the level of “aggressive student conduct” is higher. (The complete report is available online at www.austin.isd.tenet.edu/k12/docs/reagan/ ReaganSafetyTeam.pdf.) However, the team’s findings about the Mosley case were also supposed to be made public; now that the board has elected to hand that issue over to its defense attorney, it remains to be seen if and how that will happen. Cole told the board that details would still be made public — in accordance with the rules of civil litigation. The public “approach” the district used in considering the broader issue of safety at Reagan “is not an option,” he said, “given the … reasonable expectation of litigation against the district.” Still, Cole told the board that while he has “confirmed” that the district will be sued, the threat doesn’t have him “worried.”
This article appears in August 29 • 2003.