District to pay $7.5M to 5 people in sex abuse case

Suit alleges teacher assaulted boys and officials did nothing

SAN JOSE >> A South San Jose school district will pay $7.5 million to five men to settle a lawsuit alleging the district allowed a predatory teacher to sexually abuse them in the late 1970s and early 1980s, failing to intervene even in the face of ample evidence of the wrongdoing — even as the teacher seemingly took no steps to conceal his actions.

The lawsuit contended that Dennis Thomas sexually assaulted the plaintiffs — crimes for which he would be criminally convicted — over a span of several years at an array of locations, including Cinnabar Elementary School, his home, motels in Santa Cruz and on overnight and multiday getaways, many of which were known to school administrators.

At most, the plaintiffs say, Thomas was only told to stop bringing the boys to his apartment.

Max Allen, one of the plaintiffs who was willing to speak publicly, said the monetary settlement is secondary to obtaining some acknowledgment of how school and district administrators failed to protect him and his other abused classmates. Most of the victims were in the fourth and fifth grades.

“For me, it's more about having the school district take responsibility,” Allen said in an interview with the Bay Area News Group. “That's the biggest thing to me.”

Another plaintiff, who is identified in the lawsuit as John Roe 3 and asked that his name be withheld to protect his family's privacy, said the settlement offers some closure to what had been an unresolved stain on their lives.

“In speaking out, we are also talking to those people who find themselves in the moral dilemma of protecting an institution versus protecting a child,” Roe said. “If you witness or are informed of sexual abuse, you must guide that child to a place where they can get help.”

The settlement is the second multimillion-dollar payout for a teacher sexual abuse case in the Union School District this year. In March, a Santa Clara County civil jury awarded two women a total of $102.5 million in damages after they sued over the unchecked sexual grooming and abuse they suffered from a music teacher who later was convicted and sentenced to more than 50 years in prison. The district is appealing the amount of the jury award.

“It's just unbelievable it was happening then 40 years ago, and it's happening now,” said Lauren Cerri, the plaintiff's attorney with the firm Corsiglia McMahon and Allard, which specializes in school-abuse litigation. “What these men did was speak out and tell the district and all districts it's unacceptable to sweep these things under the rug and not protect kids.”

In a statement, Superintendent Carrie Andrews voiced support for the settlement in the Thomas case.

“We hope this settlement agreement brings closure for the victims,” Andrews said. “These events occurred decades ago, and we have made significant progress in our training, reporting procedures and methods for investigating alleged sexual abuse.”

Thomas, now in his early 80s, was convicted in 1982 of lewd and lascivious behavior with children under 14 and was admitted to Atascadero State Hospital in lieu of a seven-year prison sentence. He was admitted as a “mentally disordered sex offender” and received outpatient treatment while serving probation, records show. Mike Leninger, a former sexual assault detective with the San Jose Police Department who works with Cerri's law firm as a private investigator, says he interviewed Thomas for the litigation and that Thomas did not express remorse for his actions with the boys.

“He believes they were relationships,” Leninger said in an interview. “He doesn't believe he did anything wrong. He was angry there was a lawsuit. He said something like, `I got over it, so should they.' ”

The plaintiffs contended that there was ample evidence, in plain sight, of the abuse for which Thomas would be convicted. Their accounts in the lawsuit described Thomas routinely having boys sit in his lap while he rubbed their bodies, and that the principal at the time was told that sexual acts were happening between Thomas and male students.

Allen and several of the other plaintiffs testified over 40 years ago that they were spending weekends at Thomas' home. Allen said Thomas took him on a cruise to Mexico, with the school principal at the time also being on the same cruise. Their past testimony also detailed two- and threeday stays with Thomas at a Santa Cruz motel and trips to amusement parks like Disneyland and Great America in Santa Clara.

But other than gentle admonitions about the impropriety of his private time with 10-year-old boys, they contend in their lawsuit that no serious intervention took place to stop Thomas.

“The school hasn't admitted responsibility. Kids came forward and told them what was happening, and they didn't listen,” Cerri said. “The lawsuit forces them to listen now.”

Allen and his co-plaintiffs sued the Union School District under Assembly Bill 218, a law that went into effect in 2020. It extended the state's statute of limitations for people whose whose abuse claims normally would have expired, allowing them to sue schools and youth organizations for mishandling or covering up sexual misconduct. The extension, however, expires at the end of the year.

In depositions for the lawsuit, Allen, Roe and the other plaintiffs described experiencing ongoing posttraumatic stress and stated that their abuse had continual impacts on their marriages and personal health, detailing struggles with depression, insomnia, drug and substance abuse, and eating disorders. The lawsuit settlement, Allen said, has been part of the process of coming to grips with what happened to them.

“I want to let others out there know there's no shame in what happened to them. The people who turned their heads, they're the ones who should be hanging their heads in shame,” he said. “We need them to know this law is out there for them, and there are six months left. There are a lot of us out there who could get their voice heard.”