Mother of drowned autistic boy seeks $5M from Maryland school.

Feb 23, 2007

The mother of a 7-year-old autistic boy who drowned in a public pool near his West Baltimore school last summer is suing the city school board and the day care company the board hired.
Harriet Cox alleges that Lafayette Elementary School officials knew her son, Tyji Chester, had autism, and in response, the school had retained Care Resources Inc. to provide a trained aide to monitor Chester and another child.
Around midday on June 6, Chester wandered off school grounds with some other students and made his way to the Central Rosemont pool a block away, said James L. Rhodes, lawyer for the plaintiff.
"His autism was such that the minute you turned your eye from him, he would bolt and run away," Rhodes said. "He was supposed to have been chaperoned for the entire day. For some odd reason - information we haven't received yet - during the lunch period, no one was watching Chester."
Rhodes did not know if Chester scaled the pool fence, slipped through an opening or received a hoist from the other students. The pool was not yet open for the summer season, and since Chester could not swim, he drowned.
Rhodes said an unidentified woman came to visit Cox at her home days after the incident and said she had been responsible for watching Chester and the other boy until the school had relieved her of that duty days before the incident.
Neither the Office of Legal Counsel, which represents the Baltimore City Board of School Commissioners, nor Jane Satterfield, named representative for Care Resources, returned calls for comment.