$540K for attacked ex-students

Jury rules Canyon Springs High failed to provide security

A Las Vegas jury has awarded a total of $540,000 to three former Canyon Springs High School students who were attacked during a 2013 event.

In a verdict reached late Monday, jurors found the Clark County School District and the school’s former principal, Ronnie Guerzon, negligent for failing to provide security during a Senior Sunrise Breakfast in August 2013, according to court documents.

A lawyer for the victims — Bijo’n Perry, Gabriel Ureno and Gerad Davis — said school officials did not verify that those attending the event were students at the North Las Vegas school.

Each of the victims was struck with a firearm during the attack.

“This is about trying to get the school to recognize that they didn’t protect them and that they need to do more to protect students and keep guns off campus,” attorney Adam Ganz said Tuesday. “They got lucky that it wasn’t a mass shooting in this case.”

A school district spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.

The verdict comes as the district grapples with a rising tide of school violence as the district has simultaneously worked to reduce suspensions and expulsions.

More recently, school shootings across the country have prompted government and education officials to tackle the issue of safety on campus. Gov. Brian Sandoval created a 25-member school-safety committee that will submit recommendations to him in August.

Ureno, now 22, and Davis, now 21, told the Las Vegas Review-journal in a conference call Tuesday that they believe the attack could have been prevented by school officials if they

VERDICT

former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, 78, had undergone surgery to have a tumor removed from his pancreas. The family statement did not say that the tumor was cancerous, but experts say the fact that Reid’s doctors are following the surgery with chemotherapy almost certainly indicates that it was.

Major cause of cancer death

Pancreatic cancer is the fourth-leading cause of cancer death in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Even with successful surgery and chemotherapy, the average survival rate is between 26 and 30 months, said Dr. Charles St. Hill, Duda’s surgeon at University Medical Center and a surgical oncologist who teaches at UNLV’S School of Medicine.

“Last year, 43,000 people were diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in the United States,” St. Hill said. “And there were 53,000 people living with pancreatic cancer in that same year. Which means that every year, there’s only a few people who make it past a year.”

St. Hill said pancreatic cancer takes many forms and stressed that he can’t generalize about Sen. Reid’s case without knowing the particulars.

In Duda’s case, another lucky break helped her beat the odds. Her cancer presented itself differently than most — one day, while at church, she started to feel pain in her lower abdomen that reminded her of a baby’s kick.

Usually, a tumor would block the bile duct and cause jaundice in late stages, but not pain. But after visiting several doctors and urgent care clinics that misdiagnosed her case as diverticulitis, a CAT scan and endoscopy showed Duda was living with a massive lump on her pancreas. In other words, those kicks in the gut meant her cancer was diagnosed while it was still Stage 1.

Katie Duda took to the internet to research her mom’s options.

“I’m very persistent and kept searching and researching, and found out there was this procedure called the Whipple procedure,” she said.

Personal plea answered

She called St. Hill’s office, but he was out of town. After another local doctor declined to take her mom’s case, she called back.

More internet scouring turned up St. Hill’s personal email, so Katie Duda drafted a plea.

“I moved out here with the plan that I was burying my father, not my mother,” said Katie Duda, who lost her father last year to heart disease. “Taking no as an answer (from St. Hill) was not happening.”

He agreed to take the case.

Tumor aside, Duda was healthy, making her a good candidate for surgery, and the cancer hadn’t spread so far that it was inoperable.

But the Whipple procedure — or pancreaticoduodenectomy, in technical terms — wasn’t without risks. With a 5 percent chance of dying and 40 percent chance of complications, it’s one of the more dangerous cancer-related surgeries, St. Hill said.

That didn’t stop Duda. As doctors whisked her to the operating room, Duda said she never once thought she might not make it. She had a granddaughter’s first Holy Communion to attend.

“Now, I have long-term goals,” she said, including another granddaughter’s Holy Communion in four years.

Eventually, doctors tell Duda, the cancer will likely return. While treatments have improved in recent years, there still is no cure, St. Hill said.

“So 20 years ago, colon cancer was like this, where people didn’t live that long after you do surgery … but the chemotherapy over the years has gotten much better,” St. Hill said. “We still have a long way to go in terms of treatment” for pancreatic cancer.

That outlook doesn’t scare Duda, who’s deeply rooted in her Catholic faith. Every positive step in life’s journey comes, again, “with the grace of God,” she says.

“The reality is this should’ve killed me two years ago, and it didn’t,” she said. “I’ve been given the gift of life this far, and whatever else I get is going to be a gift.”

Contact Jessie Bekker at jbekker@ reviewjournal.com or 702-380-4563. Follow @jessiebekks on Twitter.