Student files suit over pledge

HOUSTON — A lawsuit says a Houston student’s Constitutional rights were violated when she was expelled for not standing for the Pledge of Allegiance.

Randall Kallinen, an attorney for 17-year-old India Landry’s family, said the civil lawsuit was filed Saturday against the Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District and a high school principal.

The lawsuit says Landry, who’d been sitting for the pledge in class, was expelled Monday after doing that in the principal’s office. The lawsuit says Landry returned to school Friday after the principal reversed course, saying Landry could sit.

Landry, who is black, told KHOU she doesn’t think “the flag is what it says it’s for, for liberty and justice and all that.”

A district spokeswoman said Saturday she was unaware of a lawsuit and referred to a district statement saying a student won’t be removed for refusing to stand for the pledge. for about a year said he could not bring himself to report their deaths to authorities.

“I was traumatized,” Robert James Kuefler said Saturday. “What would you do?”

White Bear Police Capt. Dale Hager said Kuefler, 60, was charged this week with interference with a dead body or scene of death because Kuefler moved his brother’s body. Hager said both the brother and the mother died of natural causes in 2015.

Several months after their deaths, Kuefler wrote to other family members in a Christmas card that both were in bad health and could not talk on the phone and did not want visitors. Police did not find the bodies until September 2016, when a neighbor reported that the Kueflers’ lawn in the Minneapolis suburb of White Bear Lake was overgrown and that it had been a long time since she had seen activity at the house.

Kuefler told the AP that his mother, 94-yearold Evelyn Kuefler, died in August 2015 and his brother, Richard Kuefler, died several months before.