The Girl in the Bathroom

The boys found Brianna huddled behind a partition in the back of their bathroom, her violin case and schoolbooks on the floor next to her. She'd been there for a while.

They snickered as a teacher came and went without seeing her. Brianna wouldn't move. She wouldn't ask for help.

Finally someone alerted the orchestra teacher, who coaxed her off the floor and out of the bathroom just as one of Ruskin High School's off-duty police officers arrived.

Officer Debra Praschak escorted Brianna through the clutch of boys to the security office, where the two were met by Assistant Principal Vivian Brooks. Brianna didn't know Praschak and had encountered Brooks only when she got in trouble for yelling at a teacher and breaking the school's dress code.

She wouldn't talk at first. But finally, the 14-year-old freshman told the women that she'd been pushed into the bathroom and forced to suck a boy's dick.

Over the next three hours Brianna was passed from Praschak and Brooks to the school's full-time security officer, John Delaney, and back. They told her it was impossible to force someone to give a blow job. They asked why she was in the hallway in the first place. They said her story wasn't credible.

By then, it wasn't. Brianna reacted to the interrogation by changing her story.

When Brooks finally called Brianna's mother, Lisa Wilson (both the mother's and daughter's names have been changed for this story), Brooks suggested they meet the next morning and warned that Brianna should not come back to Ruskin without her mother.

Wilson forced a meeting that day instead. After her daughter had spent hours with school and law-enforcement officers, Wilson remembers her mumbling that she had "made a bad choice."

But Wilson wondered if the bad choice had been hers in trusting the Hickman Mills School District to look after her daughter.

In an era when school officials tend to be hypervigilant about student behavior, Ruskin High School employees took a skeptical approach to a student's report that she'd been raped, documents and interviews show. Although Brooks and two security officers knew little about Brianna, they decided on the spot that she was the sort of young woman who would willingly perform oral sex on two boys in a bathroom.

The result: School officials disregarded Brianna's complaints that she suffered subsequent harassment from boys at the school after rumors about her spread through the student body. Then, two months after the first attack, Brianna says that Ruskin High School boys once again dragged her into a bathroom. This time, three boys held her down and raped her, she says.

The police are taking her more seriously than school officials did. On May 5, Kansas City, Missouri, police officers arrested an 18-year-old student connected with the first assault. A week later, police forwarded their investigation of three other 16-year-old boys connected with both attacks to juvenile court.

Brianna's family is preparing to file a lawsuit to hold the school district accountable.

"I always thought there were two places children were safe," Wilson says. "One was while they were with me at home, and the other was when they were at school. I thought they would protect her at all costs. How dumb I was."

Wilson says school administrators told her that the two boys involved in the first bathroom assault received five-day suspensions. Not surprisingly, Wilson finds this inadequate.

She filed a complaint with the Kansas City, Missouri, Police Department, challenging the conduct of off-duty officers Delaney and Praschak, who didn't file a police report until two days after the first attack. The department's investigation did not find that the officers had acted improperly.

District Superintendent Marge Williams cites privacy regulations in declining to talk specifically about the case or what happened to the students involved. She tells the Pitch that she did brief the school board about Brianna's complaint at a board meeting last October.

"It wasn't presented as a big deal, as I recall," Board President David Bass tells the Pitch. "We were told it was handled appropriately."

Williams says that when the situation was described to her, she decided that it could be handled by the principal and didn't require her involvement. The district's attorney, Chris Gahagan, says a two-member faculty team investigated and determined that Brianna's allegations didn't fall under the district's sexual-harassment policies.

Gahagan says the officers and assistant principal simply didn't believe Brianna. "If you believe she was sexually assaulted, obviously anything short of expulsion wouldn't be enough."

Not satisfied with the school's handling of the matter, Wilson filed a police report on her own. She also lodged a complaint with the Missouri Commission on Human Rights. And she has found an attorney who is considering a federal civil suit against the Hickman Mills School District.

Brianna was almost 4 when she came to live with Wilson in November 1992. A photo taken at the time shows a little girl with light skin and long, dark hair. Brianna and her brother are biracial; and they were victims of abuse who had been exposed to HIV, though they never tested positive for it.