Thursday, November 11, 1999
Boy injured by students gets $115,000 settlement
By Daniel de Vise
ddevise@herald.com
A boy whose knee was crushed when several other students "dog-piled" on top of him in a Weston school band room has won a $115,000 settlement from the classmates and the school, their attorneys said Wednesday.
Jimmy Prilides was a seventh-grader at Tequesta Trace Middle School in December 1994 when a fellow band member yelled "Let's get Jimmy!" and several children leapt on him, his lawyer said. The incident left him immobilized for four months.
"Dog-piling" is vernacular for a form of roughhousing that has several students pile atop an unwilling victim. "We probably never would have filed the lawsuit had the school officials just said. 'We are sorry for what happened to your son,'" said Jim Prilides, Jimmy's father.
Carl Bober, a Fort Lauderdale attorney whose firm represented the Broward school district, noted that its portion of the settlement was small and that there was no finding of fault against either the school or the other children.
"The School Board itself paid $25,000 to settle this matter," Bober said. Four other families paid $22,000 each.
An attorney for the Prilides family alleged that school officials failed to file a crime report on the 1994 incident and sought to cover it up along with nine other dog-piling cases that year.
At the time, Tequesta Trace was in the running for a Blue Ribbon award, the highest honor bestowed by the U.S Department of Education on a school. The campus ultimately won the award in 1996. It hinges partly on student conduct.
"They didn't want disciplinary proceedings on the book," said attorney Roy Oppenheim, who represented the Prilides family.
Jimmy, now 17, wants to study orthopedic medicine - with an emphasis on knees.
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