The parents of a 15-year-old student-athlete at Valparaiso (Ind.) High School have filed a negligence lawsuit against Valparaiso Community Schools and the City of Valparaiso after a football injury went unobserved and ignored by coaches.
According to WNDU, Valparaiso High School football hosted an off-season, limited contact practice on Feb. 2. Despite not wearing helmets or pads, the student at the center of the lawsuit was knocked down and hit in the head. Per his account, no coaches or training staff came to his aid.
As a result of the hit, he suffered a severe concussion, injured his neck and broke his wrist.
When coaches and training staff did not intervene, the student called his father for help, and his father was the one to retrieve him from school and transport him to the hospital where doctors performed an emergency CT scan.
In the weeks following the incident, that student-athlete has been in and out of the hospital several times and has not made a full recovery; in fact, some symptoms have worsened.
“They [doctors] said that he’s in the 15th percentile of a really bad concussion. And they said it could be weeks, months. They don’t know,” said the student’s father, Jason Soloman.
Soloman told WNDU that he wants to see someone at the school take accountability for what happened at that Feb. 2 practice, including for the other student-athletes involved.
According to CBS News, the Soloman family has been receiving threats from other football players on the team. These threats escalated to the point of the Soloman’s pulling their son from school.
"Even as far as this morning, he got a message stating that, when you come back, the football team's looking to, you know, jump you," Solomon said. "I just do not feel safe to have my son in that school."
In a statement, attorneys representing the family said, “Football is an inherently dangerous and physical sport, and families accept certain risks when their children participate. However, parents entrust schools and coaching staff with the fundamental duty to prioritize safety, enforce established safety protocols (such as limits on contact and requirements for protective equipment), and to act swiftly and responsibly when injuries occur. In this case, those safeguards and protocols appear to have failed dramatically, resulting in egregious injuries.”
