San Angelo School Watched Teacher Terrorize 4-Year-Old on Camera, Lawsuit Claims

SAN ANGELO, TX - A newly amended lawsuit, filed by The Button Law Firm, claims Trinity Lutheran School administrators witnessed a teacher terrorize a 4-year-old girl on surveillance cameras—then chose not to intervene, preserve the footage or tell her parents for five days. 

The complaint alleges that on March 24, 2021, the teacher screamed at, belittled and manhandled the preschooler—pushing her to the ground, yanking her by the arm, dragging her across the classroom, and locking her alone in a dark closet. In addition, the lawsuit states the teacher threatened to call the police on the preschooler and told her that her parents wanted her to go to jail. Every incident was captured on the school's surveillance cameras.

Text messages cited in the lawsuit reveal Trinity Lutheran School's director and principal received more than four months of explicit warnings from a preschool teacher that she was approaching a mental health breakdown, including one in which she called a "meltdown at work" her "worst nightmare." The school's response, per the complaint, was to continue having her come into work and sending her back to her classroom—prioritizing staffing over child safety.

The newly amended petition's most shocking allegations detail the inaction of Trinity Lutheran School administrators. The leaders failed to intervene at every step, even after the director watched recorded footage of the abuse the day it happened, the lawsuit claims, but never dropped in to the preschool classroom and made no attempts to remove the teacher. The suit also states staff repeatedly passed the preschool classroom's door while the 4-year-old was loudly crying and the teacher was screaming at her — they, too, failed to intervene.

The next morning, when the Killingsworths raised concerns, leaders at Trinity Lutheran School said nothing about what they observed on the footage—a silence the petition says lasted five days, despite Texas childcare laws requiring schools to immediately report these kinds of incidents and the principal's own testimony that parents have an "absolute right to know." Trinity Lutheran School leaders also failed to preserve material evidence, with hours of surveillance footage missing from the preschool classroom the day of the terrorizing incident, per the complaint.

"Trinity Lutheran School's leadership ignored state childcare laws and failed to stop a 4-year-old girl and her preschool classmates from being terrorized by a teacher while under the school's watch," says daycare injury attorney Russell Button of The Button Law Firm. "This is what happens when a school prioritizes its staffing schedule over a child's safety, then tries to bury the truth instead of owning up to their multiple failures that broke the law."