The family of Amarr Murphy-Paine, the 17-year-old shot and killed in the Garfield High parking lot in the final weeks of last school year, is suing the school district alleging officials were negligent in their security practices at the 23rd Ave school.
An attorney for the family told KUOW the suit focuses on the district’s “failure to adequately respond, the failure to have adequate security, the failure to protect students in general, and our clients’ son in particular.”
The June 2024 deadly shooting was a “foreseeable outcome” of the school’s “open campus” policies and “inadequate security measures in a neighborhood with a history of gun violence,” the suit reads.
The district and Garfield officials say they have been busy upgrading campus security and working more closely with the Seattle Police Department headed into this summer.
CHS reported here as gun violence claimed another young Garfield life this spring far from the campus in a deadly shooting in Yakima.
The increased security resources this spring include the launch of a new district-wide “visitor management system” involving cameras, plus increased private security and SPD presence outside the campuses, officials say.
Last June, the 17-year-old Murphy-Paine was shot and killed during a lunchtime altercation in the school’s parking lot. Murphy-Paine’s killer remains at large.
In response to the slaying and gun violence’s impact on school campuses across the city, Seattle officials began the academic year with a $14.5 million plan focused on intervention, mental health, and increased use of “school-based safety specialist” private security guards.
The upcoming vote on a new schools levy, meanwhile, will also provide a new catalyst for school safety spending. The proposed expanded levy Includes a planned $235 million in school safety investments described as supporting existing school health centers and “expanded safety investments in and around schools” in summaries. That spending could include the return of Community resource officers, dropped by the district in the summer of 2020 when the board suspended a partnership with SPD that provided five armed officers with rotations and placements across Seattle’s public schools
The newly filed wrongful death lawsuit seeks damages to be decided by a jury.
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