Unsupervised child in wheelchair broke both legs at Colorado school after sliding down ramp, lawsuit alleges

DENVER — An Adams County mother filed a federal lawsuit Monday alleging her disabled 12-year-old son was left unattended at his Westminster elementary school, slid down a ramp in his wheelchair and crashed into a wall, breaking both of his legs.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Denver, alleges Adams 12 Five Star Schools violated the federal Americans with Disabilities Act by failing to provide reasonable accommodations for the child, resulting in him facing “severe and grievous physical, mental and emotional suffering, humiliation, stigma and other injuries.”

“Their failure to properly supervise him is what resulted in this catastrophic injury and then they made it worse because they minimized the effects of what happened,” said Igor Raykin, the attorney representing Patricia Portillo Estrada and her boy, who is not named in the lawsuit.

On Monday, Christina Dahmen, a spokesperson for Adams 12 Five Star Schools, said the district had not yet been served the complaint.

“If we are served with a complaint, the district’s practice is not to share information on pending or ongoing litigation,” Dahmen said.

According to the lawsuit, the Rocky Mountain Elementary School student — who has intellectual disabilities and orthopedic, as well as speech and language, impairments — was left unsupervised on May 10, 2022. Video footage later recovered during an investigation of the incident showed the student tried to navigate a ramp by himself in his wheelchair and slid down, crashing into a wall at the bottom, where his legs took the brunt of impact.

“At least one unidentified school employee discovered the Plaintiff at the bottom of the ramp but did not assist him,” the lawsuit said. “Instead, the Plaintiff, a 12-year-old severely disabled child, was left to collect himself after sustaining serious injuries, and return himself to class.”

The child’s Individualized Education Program — a legal document outlining care needs for special education students — stated that while the child could independently move his walker and wheelchair, he required supervision and assistance for ramps and other uneven terrain, the lawsuit said.

The IEP also said the child required “safety monitoring from staff throughout the day due to medical, mobility and functional issues,” according to the lawsuit.

Despite the child being “on the verge of tears” all day, according to internal school reports, nobody investigated the situation or contacted Portillo Estrada, the lawsuit said. Portillo Estrada primarily speaks Spanish and has communicated with the school through occasional interpreters, school employees or free translation services like Google Translate.

When Portillo Estrada picked her son up from the bus stop, she said he was in pain and told her he fell at school. She messaged the school saying her son said he fell from his wheelchair and injured himself on campus.

“The school took no action to investigate the Plaintiff’s incident, nor the cause of his injury,” the lawsuit said. “Without knowledge of the accident, and with no information from the School, Ms. Portillo Estrada had no way of knowing the severity of the Plaintiff’s injury.”

When Portillo Estrada took her son to the emergency room two days after the incident, his knees were swollen and he appeared in pain.

The child was diagnosed with bilateral proximal tibial and fibular fractures, which required splinting and immobilizing his legs. He was confined to a hospital bed for a week and spent more than a month bedridden due to his injuries, the lawsuit said, and he developed painful bed sores.

Portillo Estrada had to quit her job to care for her son around the clock, the lawsuit said.

“What I hope is that this school district and other school districts and the nation actually provide proper services and supervision to kids like this,” Raykin said. “What I also hope is that the family can get some assistance with the medical services that this kid needs right now and is going to continue to need for the rest of his life.”

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