Parents of Murdered Student Sue U. of Utah for $56 Million, Claiming Gender Discrimination

The parents of a University of Utah student who was shot to death by her ex-boyfriend filed a lawsuit on Thursday claiming the university had been “deliberately indifferent” to the abuse their daughter had suffered, thereby violating Title IX, the federal gender-equity law.

At a news conference Jill McCluskey said the lawsuit was “our last resort to effect positive change” at the university after her daughter, Lauren McCluskey, a 21-year-old senior, was fatally shot on the campus by Melvin Shawn Rowland.

Before she was killed, on October 22, 2018, Lauren McCluskey had called the campus police department repeatedly to report that she was receiving threatening text messages and then that she was being extorted by Rowland after she broke up with him.

On the day of her death McCluskey called the campus police to say that someone was impersonating a police administrator in an attempt to lure her from her dormitory. The officer who spoke with McCluskey told her to ignore the text, but he did not report it up the chain of command. That evening Rowland, who had been on the campus most of the day, killed McCluskey.

An external review, commissioned by the university, found that the campus police department hadn’t investigated the extortion as quickly as it should have. Nor were its police officers trained to recognize the more subtle signs of domestic violence that McCluskey displayed, The Chronicle previously reported. The review also criticized the campus housing department. McCluskey’s friends had reported to housing officials that Rowland was manipulating and isolating the 21-year-old. Ultimately, housing officials decided not to “overstep” because McCluskey herself had not come forward.

After the review was made public, Ruth V. Watkins, the university’s president, said it “does not offer any reason to believe that this tragedy could have been prevented.”

The McCluskeys disagree.

“If any one of these failures did not occur,” Jill McCluskey said on Thursday, “Lauren would be alive today.”

Their daughter’s death was a “direct result” of the university’s failure to respond to reports of “stalking, abuse, intimidation, dating violence,” and “other dangerous and abusive behaviors prohibited under Title IX,” the law firm representing the McCluskeys wrote in the complaint, filed in U.S. District Court.

In a written statement Watkins said that the university would “respond to the McCluskey family’s lawsuit through the appropriate channels” and that she wanted to “express again our deep sorrow for the loss of Lauren McCluskey.

“While there are differences in how we would characterize some of the events leading to Lauren’s tragic murder,” Watkins continued, “let me say again that we share the McCluskey family’s commitment to improving campus safety.”

The McCluskeys, who are both professors at Washington State University, were joined at the news conference by Daniel J. Bernardo, its departing provost. Bernardo, noting that he was speaking as a private citizen, said that he’d stayed quiet about McCluskey’s case because he knows firsthand “how difficult student tragedies can be on college administrators.”

But he decided to speak up, he said, partly because Utah has failed to hold anyone accountable through disciplinary action. (The detective who was assigned McCluskey’s case is no longer with the department. The university has declined to say if she was fired or resigned.)

“Best management practices and basic safeguards were not in place to protect Lauren,” Bernardo said.

Named as defendants are the university; the housing department; the campus police department; Dale Brophy, the police chief; several police officers, including the detective assigned to McCluskey’s case; several housing officials; and 10 “Jane/John Does.” All of them “failed to take any action reasonably calculated to end the abuse and prevent its reoccurrence or to otherwise investigate the allegations,” the lawsuit says, “thereby acting with deliberate indifference and subjecting Lauren to further and ongoing abuse.”

McCluskey’s rights under the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution were also violated, the lawsuit argues, because the university had based its decisions about McCluskey’s case on “gender stereotypes.” Those stereotypes include the notion that women overreact, that women are unreasonable, and that women are often untruthful when they report abuse, the lawsuit says.

The McCluskeys are seeking $56 million in damages. Any money from the lawsuit will go to the Lauren McCluskey Foundation, Jill McCluskey said.

Updated (6/27/2019, 4:26 p.m.): This article has been updated with a statement by Ruth V. Watkins, president of the University of Utah.

Emma Pettit is a staff reporter at The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter @EmmaJanePettit, or email her at emma.pettit@chronicle.com.