Alleged abuse left a 12-year-old child dead. Did LAUSD block it?

Sharon Zavaleta Chuquipa tries to sleep in the room where she sleeps with her younger sister. Every room, decoration and toy has small, hurtful reminders of a 12-year-old child who was suddenly cut off.

Grief is hard – and so is guilt. He says that sometimes it is too much to bear.

“I’m sorry,” she said in Spanish, tears welling up in her eyes. If he hadn’t gotten involved, he would be here with me.

February 17 was the day Sharon’s life changed forever. His afternoon began as usual, with a group of bullies at Reseda Charter High School harassing him as he headed to the finals, he said. But things took a turn for the worse when his younger sister, Khimberly, stepped in to defend him and was hit over the head with a metal water bottle.

Kimberly was taken to Valley Presbyterian Hospital in Van Nuys, where she was evaluated, treated and released the same day, according to her family.

Three days later, major blood vessels in his brain burst, his family said. He was taken to UCLA Mattel Children’s Hospital, where he underwent emergency brain surgery and was placed in a medically induced coma.

It was useless. Kimberly died on February 25. The county medical examiner has not yet released an autopsy report on the girl’s cause of death.

The dramatic tragedy has led others, including Khimberly’s family, to question whether the Los Angeles Unified School District could have — or should have — done more to protect the girl.

“We have a lot to answer for the school, because, they don’t do anything,” said his mother, Elma Chuquipa Sanchez, in Spanish. “Every day, I would go to school and be there making noise [about ongoing bullying].

“But it was all in vain,” he continued. “Now, my child is gone.”

Khimberly’s mother, Elma Chuquipa Sanchez, center, and aunt Liz Trugman met with the family’s attorney on April 9 in Los Angeles.

(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)

LAUSD is the second largest school district in the US, serving approximately 549,000 students in more than 1,500 different locations.

Students are asked each year about their experiences of bullying, with the results compiled and released annually as part of the School of Information’s regional survey.

Students answer questions about many types of bullying, including verbal, sexual and cyber-based bullying. During the last full school year, 17% of middle school students and 6% of high school students said they agreed or strongly agreed with the statement that they were “pushed, shoved, slapped, hit or kicked by someone who wasn’t playing.”

Reseda Charter High’s responses were in line with those of the district as a whole – 18% of middle school students agreed with the statement, and 6% of high school students agreed.

Data from the National Center for Education Statistics shows that there has been a long-term decline in bullying in US schools since the 2010s.

California, too, has seen all types of abuse “decline dramatically” in the past 20 years, according to Ron Avi Astor, an abuse expert and sociology professor at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. A study he co-authored found a 56% drop in fighting in California high schools from 2001 to 2019.

However, Khimberly’s death is a powerful reminder of the devastating abuse and inequality can have on students and their families.

“Schools are now more aware than before, there are many interventions, there are many programs,” said Astor. “I think school facilities are very serious [about addressing bullying]because it can cause bodily harm and unfortunately, in this case, even death.”

He noted that LAUSD faces more challenges in addressing this issue than other districts — pointing to the size and diversity of the student body and the high turnover rate of teachers and administrators.

Tanya Ortiz Franklin, a member of the LAUSD board, said that while she could not comment on Khimberly’s case because of the pending litigation, she did not believe that bullying was a major problem across the district.

“In one family with a child who is being abused, it is a really big problem,” he said. But if you look at a good program of half a million kids in a city with a lot of diversity that includes not only different cultural upbringings but different ideas about what’s right and wrong, you might expect a lot more conflict.”

Ortiz Franklin, who chairs the district’s Safety and Climate Committee, said the highest levels of bullying and fighting are seen in middle school, when students are still learning how to deal with negative emotions.

He mentioned that the district has worked to deal with this using new methods such as cell phone bans, which are intended not only to increase focus in the classroom but also to encourage building face-to-face relationships and a sense of community. He also referred to efforts to teach social and emotional literacy, so students learn to process negative emotions using words, not violence.

There were 5,636 fights and other violent crimes reported in LA Unified in the 2024-25 school year and 5,707 in the previous year, according to data presented at a committee meeting in November.

Between July 1 and Nov. 6, there were 1,786 incidents of physical abuse reported on LAUSD campuses – which translates to a rate of 4.5 reported incidents per 1,000 students. 2,506 such incidents were reported in the same four-month period in 2024, and 2,232 were reported in that window in 2023.

The statistics were released from the Incident System Tracking Accountability report – an imprecise, but useful, metric that tracks incidents of fighting, drugs, threats and weapons at school. These reports are often generated by school administrators who have discretion over what is filed but may face consequences if an unreported incident later leads to problems.

Overall the numbers and trends across the state mean little to Khimberly’s family.

They say bullying and physical abuse are an accepted part of Reseda Charter High’s culture and filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the district on Monday, alleging that the school does not take reports of abuse seriously. The principal did not respond to a request for comment, and a district spokeswoman said she could not comment on the litigation.

From left, Khimberly’s sister Sharon, aunt Liz Trugman, mother Elma Chuquipa Sanchez and father Jesus Alfredo Zavaleta Tafur meet their lawyer. The family has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the school district.

(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)

The family’s attorney, Robert Glassman, said that since he started the case, his firm, Panish Shea Ravipudi, has been flooded with calls about bullying in LAUSD.

“Every day, including today, we receive many calls from parents, especially, but also from other teachers saying that this epidemic is so prevalent in this region that something needs to be done,” he said.

Khimberly’s parents came to Los Angeles from Peru five years ago and enrolled their daughters in LAUSD, hoping it would lead to a brighter future for their daughters.

Kimberly wanted to be a doctor. He loved swimming in their pool, riding his bike, playing volleyball and basketball, singing and drawing.

Kimberly Zavaleta Chuquipa, 12, was born in Lima, Peru.

(Soudi Jiménez / LA Times in Español)

“She was a very lovely girl, very kind, and very loved by everyone,” said her father, Jesus Alfredo Zavaleta Tafur, in Spanish. “It’s a good thing you’re her father.”

Her mother said that it has been more than a year since her daughters were abused, she said that she was always crying at school, the officials know her by name. Since Khimberly’s death, he said, several other parents have come to hear and talk about how their children were abused at school.

He said the school’s lack of support is what made his family take legal action against the district. Six weeks before the Feb. 17 incident, the same group of students who attacked Sharon and Khimberly were filmed attacking another female student, according to the complaint.

The family suspects that Khimberly would still be alive if the district had taken steps such as writing down and investigating reports of abuse, punishing students who abused Khimberly and Sharon and using anti-bullying measures at school. The family also blames the school for failing to have enough staff and to monitor the area in the corridor where the incident took place on February 17.

A 12-year-old student was arrested by the Los Angeles Police Department earlier this month on suspicion of murder in connection with Kimberly’s death. The case remains under investigation, and so far no charges have been filed, according to the LA County district attorney’s office.

Chuquipa Sanchez hopes the case will lead the district to make meaningful changes so administrators will take future reports of bullying seriously.

“They waited until my daughter died to finally take action,” she said. “That was not appropriate [the bullies] we continued to go to school and my daughters suffered. One had to change schools, the other one was buried.”

Times staff writers Brittny Mejia, Ruben Vives and Howard Blume contributed to this report.