A Louisiana appellate court recently dismissed a wrongful death lawsuit being pursued by a woman whose teenaged son died by suicide hours after his Catholic school expelled him for what he had described as a shoving match with a campus bully.
One of the attorneys for plaintiff Sara Brannon on Friday said she intends to appeal that ruling from Louisiana’s fifth circuit appellate court in a case which characterized her son’s expulsion as unreasonable and arbitrary.
Brannon filed her state court lawsuit against the Roman Catholic archdiocese of New Orleans in March, a year after the death of her 17-year-old son Devon Shelton within hours of being expelled from one of the institution’s high schools.
She argued that Devon’s archdiocesan high school – Rummel, in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie – was negligent in its treatment of her son when it expelled him in the wake of what he termed a shoving match with a fellow student who had been bullying him.
Brannon maintained that Rummel had a duty to Devon to administer discipline in a commensurate, non-arbitrary way – and their failure to fulfill that obligation led to her son’s suicide at his former stepfather’s house. So, she said, the school owed her damages.
Lawyers for the archdiocese countered by contending that Louisiana law does not allow plaintiffs to recover damages for “off-campus acts of student self-harm following school disciplinary decisions,” as the fifth circuit court of appeal put in its ruling.
The archdiocese asked state district court judge Nancy Miller to dismiss the case, but she rejected that request in July. The archdiocese appealed – and fifth circuit judges Susan Chehardy, Jude Gravois and Marc Johnson ruled in favor of the church, overturning Miller.
“We find the facts presented in [the] plaintiff’s [lawsuit] are insufficient to impose wrongful death liability upon the school,” the appellate court said in its decision, which was handed down on 13 October and filed into the case record a week later.
The opinion referred to Devon’s death repeatedly as “tragic” – but declared “the facts of this matter … would not legally fit into any theory of recovery”.
A statement from an archdiocese spokesperson on Friday said “we remember Devon and lift him and his family in prayer” as the Catholic church prepared to pray for all of the dead in November, as it traditionally does.
Devon’s online obituary described him as a devoted player of various instruments for Rummel’s marching band. Among other things, the obituary said he was also a member of the school’s varsity bowling team and volunteered annually at a bicycle ride meant to generate charity support for people will multiple sclerosis.
One of his mother’s attorneys is Richard Trahant, who has represented numerous claimants of sexual abuse by clergy within New Orleans’ archdiocese. The archdiocese filed for bankruptcy protection in 2020 amid the financial fallout of the longstanding, worldwide Catholic church clergy molestation scandal.
In December, the archdiocese and its insurers agreed to pay about $305m to roughly 700 clergy abuse survivors. Survivors had not been paid as October ended, though there were indications that individual payments may start in the coming weeks.
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In the US, you can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. In the UK, the youth suicide charity Papyrus can be contacted on 0800 068 4141 or email pat@papyrus-uk.org, and in the UK and Ireland Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
