Kansas school, sheriff failed to stop deputy’s repeated sexual abuse of student: suit
In 2019, a Kansas school resources officer was put behind bars for sexually assaulting a student. Now, a new lawsuit seeks to hold his supervisors accountable for, what lawyers say, was a failure to report the abuse.
A federal lawsuit filed Monday accuses the former Linn County sheriff and the Pleasanton Unified School District 344 of failing to protect a student from continued assault by a school resource officer.
The suit centers around David Huggins — also named as a defendant — who, as a deputy sheriff in Linn County in 2017, was accused of having sex with and impregnating a teenage girl.
Huggins was 44 years old and a school resource officer at Pleasanton High School at the time. The victim was a 15-year-old student. The Star does not typically name victims of sex crimes without their permission.
Huggins was arrested in January 2018 and charged with aggravated indecent liberties with a minor and sexual exploitation of a child.
In February 2019, Huggins pleaded guilty to aggravated indecent liberties with a child. He was sentenced to 183 months in prison and remains imprisoned at the El Dorado Correctional Facility.
When reached by phone Tuesday morning, former sheriff Paul Filla, who has since left the department, declined to comment on the suit. Also reached Tuesday morning, the school district’s superintendent said they had not yet seen the lawsuit, and later referred The Star to their attorney, who declined to comment on pending litigation.
The suit filed Monday gives a more detailed picture of what happened prior to Huggins’ arrest. The lawsuit accuses the school district and sheriff’s office of failing to “supervise and discipline” Huggins despite their obligation to investigate allegations of sexual harassment and assault. Not doing so led to repeated instances of each.
The suit also accuses the school of negligently hiring Huggins, who had previously been accused of sexual harassment of a minor.
Filla twice failed to act to stop the abuse, first after receiving inappropriate photos of Huggins and again after he called Huggins telling him to stay away from the girl, the lawsuits alleges.
“The problem of adult men sexually harassing female, minor students (in the Pleasanton Unified School District 344) did not start with Defendant Huggins,” the suit reads.
In 2015, the suit alleges, a male teacher who worked for the district was caught “sexually soliciting a minor female student through text messages.”
Later that same year, Huggins began a school resource officer program. Before taking up a post at the high school, Huggins worked as an officer at the La Cygne Police Department in Linn County.
There, he was accused of stalking and harassing another minor while he was in uniform and she was working at a retail store, the suit alleges. The girl’s father eventually complained to the department about the sexual harassment.
Despite these allegations, the suit reads, Huggins was still hired to work at a school with minors.
In 2016, once Huggins began working at Pleasanton High School, he taught students “the dangers of text messaging sexual material, including to adults,” the suit reads.
The following year, Huggins began texting the teen student. Within a couple months of communicating over text, Huggins took the girl on a “date” and sexually assaulted her. This happened repeatedly for several months, the suit says.
At one point Huggins met the girl where she worked.
The business owner noticed Huggins being “physically intimate” with the girl. “Alarmed by the behavior,” the owner took a picture and texted it to Filla, asking for an explanation of what was going on, the suit reads.
The suit alleges that Filla did not investigate the incident nor did he discipline Huggins, who continued working at the school and continued sexually assaulting the girl. Sometimes he touched her inappropriately while in the school building, the suit alleges.
In 2017, he got her pregnant, the suit reads; she later terminated the pregnancy.
A short time later, a teacher emailed the superintendent to ask if the principal had been “briefed” on the “relationship” between the adult and the child, according to the lawsuit.
That same month, the principal called the student out of one of her classes and told her she wasn’t allowed to go to Huggins’s office anymore.
A few days after the email was sent, Huggins pulled his victim out of class to come to his office. He told her the sheriff had called and told him to “stay away” from her.
Huggins continued working at the school after that conversation with the sheriff, the suit alleges.
Sometime that year, Kansas Child Protective Services began investigating Huggins. The same day that CPS interviewed the girl about her pregnancy, the school banned the girl’s father from their property, according to the suit.
At another point, after the warnings about Huggins had circulated, he was assigned to a child welfare interview with his victim at the school, the lawsuit reads. That same day, CPS interviewed the girl’s parents at their home.
In late October of 2017, Huggins took leave from work to have a vasectomy.
A couple weeks later, in November, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation found copies of the girl’s sonogram images on Huggins’ computer at his school office, according to the lawsuit.
In December 2017, while Huggins was on a hunting trip in Iowa, a warrant was issue for his arrest.
Huggins was arrested on Jan. 4, 2018, in Iowa. He was released on bond a few weeks later, at which point the suit alleges he again sexually assaulted the girl, who then contracted HPV, a sexually-transmitted infection that can affect fertility and increases risk of cancer.
She dropped out of school the following year.
“The sexual harassment and assault was so severe, pervasive and objectively offensive that it effectively deprived her of access to educational benefits and/or opportunities,” the suit reads.
During the criminal investigation, the teen girl learned she was Huggins’ third female minor victim, according to the lawsuit.
The girl “has and will continue to suffer psychological and emotional pain and suffering, mental anguish and loss of enjoyment of life, physical pain, and medical expenses,” the suit continues.
“Defendant Huggins’ conduct shocks the conscious,” the suit reads, adding that a failure to act after allegations arose “represents a custom, usage, pattern, or practice of deliberate indifference to (the victim).
The lawsuit also names John Carr, a second former employee of the Linn County Sherrif’s Department, as another example of failures by the sheriff’s department.
In July 2017, the suit alleges, Carr sexually assaulted one of his co-workers. She immediately reported the assault to Filla. Despite this report, Carr continued working at the department.
Almost a year after the assault, the Linn County Attorney asked the KBI to investigate Carr, the suit reads.
In September 2018, the KBI arrested Carr, who eventually pleaded guilty to battery.
The Wichita Eagle’s Jason Tidd contributed.
This story was originally published December 15, 2020 at 11:12 AM.
