A family has accused the Los Angeles Unified School District of allowing their children to be taken from an Encino school by their birth mother, who disappeared with them for nine hours.
The siblings, ages 8 and 10, were attending an after-school program at Lanai Road Elementary School. They are typically picked up around 5 p.m. by Lucia Jasso, their adoptive mother, according to her attorney, Christa Ramey.
But on May 14, the children’s biological mother, Isabel Rios, entered the school office around 3:30 p.m. and asked to pick them up, providing no identification, according to a claim filed by their family against the school district. Such a claim usually precedes the filing of a lawsuit.
Rios is not designated as the person responsible for picking up either child, Ramey said. According to the claim, Rios lost custody of the siblings around 2015 due to drug addiction. Jasso, Rios’ mother, adopted both children several years later.
The children were called to the office that day and saw Rios waiting at the school gate. She called them over and let them know she was there to pick them up, to which the children “reluctantly agreed,” according to the claim.
No security or staff members were at the gate where students are picked up, the claim said.
“This conduct is not only a negligent action of LAUSD and [the after-school program‘s] employees, staff, servants, contractors, and agents, but it is also a breach of their mandatory duties to keep children in their custody safe from abduction by being picked up from its campus by unauthorized third-parties,” the claim said.
LAUSD declined to comment on the system in place for picking up students from after-school programs.
“Los Angeles Unified takes the safety and security of all students very seriously,” LAUSD spokesperson Shannon Haber said. “The District is looking into these claims. However, Los Angeles Unified does not comment on pending or ongoing litigation.”
The siblings’ whereabouts were unknown for nine hours that day, during which Rios reportedly took them on six buses and two trains to Compton, where her boyfriend’s mother lived. Officials were eventually able to track down their location with the help of closed-circuit cameras on public transportation, Ramey said.
“[The children] were traumatized, scared, tired and sore from all the walking and running they had to do,” the claim said.
The children knew Rios as a relative but did not know she was their biological mother at the time of the incident, adding to their trauma, Ramey said.
“That conversation had to be forced upon them,” the lawyer said. “That was a lot of adult information for them to learn at a really young age.”
Rios has since sent Jasso messages in which she threatens to take the children again, said Ramey, who plans to address the situation Monday with a request for a restraining order for the family.
The children “are worried about going back to school [and] whether they’ll be safe,” she said. “They feel like that’s been taken away from them.”
The claim was filed last week, and Ramey said a lawsuit will probably follow in October.
“Schools are supposed to teach our children, but they are also supposed to keep them safe,” she said.