Grammar offered $20k for broken jaw

Simon Collins

Auckland Grammar School offered to pay $20,000 to the family of a student whose jaw was smashed by another student in 2005, a High Court judgment says.

High Court Justice Anne Hinton has found that former student Jesse Liu was the victim of two “vicious assaults” by another student, and that his jaw was broken in the second assault.

The school suspended the student who committed the assaults for “approximately six weeks”.

“What happened to Mr Liu was horrifying,” Justice Hinton said in a judgment dated January 31 this year.

But she turned down a longrunning appeal by Liu and his parents seeking $50,000 in damages against their original lawyer, Derek Cutting, which they lodged on the basis that Cutting had done and commissioned work on the case that they had not authorised.

Auckland Grammar offered the family $20,000 to settle their claim against the school, but by December 2008 the family had already paid $20,000 in legal fees and owed a further $15,125.82.

The final settlement between the school and the family was confidential, but Justice Hinton said: “As they presumably settled for at least $20,000, they also did well in terms of the dollar payment, compared with what many might have predicted for such a case.”

Auckland Grammar headmaster Tim O’Connor said that, as far as he could tell from the school’s records, the school board handed the case to its insurance company.

He said it appeared that the settlement “was related to legal fees, not the student disciplinary matter”.