Alleged bullying left 12-year-old dead. Could LAUSD have prevented it?

Sharon Zavaleta Chuquipa struggles to sleep in the room she shared with her younger sister. Every corner, decoration and toy holds devastating little reminders of the 12-year-old whose life was abruptly cut short.

The grief lies heavy — as does the guilt. At times, she says, it’s almost too much to bear.

“I blame myself,” she said in Spanish, tears in her eyes. “If she hadn’t gotten involved, she’d be here with me.”

Feb. 17 was the day Sharon’s life changed forever. Her afternoon began as normal, with a group of bullies at Reseda Charter High School harassing her as she headed to final period, she said. But things escalated when her little sister, Khimberly, stepped in to defend her and was struck in the head with a metal water bottle.

Khimberly underwent emergency brain surgery and was placed in a medically induced coma after being struck in the head with a metal water bottle.

(Photo courtesy of Guy David Gazi)

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

Three days later, major blood vessels in her brain ruptured, her family said. She was rushed to UCLA Mattel Children’s Hospital, where she underwent emergency brain surgery and was placed in a medically induced coma.

It was no use. Khimberly died on Feb. 25. The county medical examiner has yet to release an autopsy report with the girl’s cause of death.

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

“The school has a lot to answer for, because, well, they did nothing,” her mother, Elma Chuquipa Sanchez, said in Spanish. “Every single day, I would head to the school and I was there making a fuss [about ongoing bullying].

“But it was all for nothing,” she continued. “Now, my baby is gone.”

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

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

LAUSD is the second-largest school district in the U.S., serving about 549,000 students at more than 1,500 different sites.

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

Students respond to questions about many forms of bullying, including verbal, sexual and internet-based harassment. 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 had “been pushed, shoved, slapped, hit or kicked by someone who wasn’t kidding around.”

The responses at Reseda Charter High 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 show that there has been a long-term decline in bullying at U.S. schools since the 2010s.

California, too, has seen all forms of bullying “dropping dramatically” in the last 20 years, according to Ron Avi Astor, a bullying expert and professor of social welfare at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. A study he co-authored found a 56% decline in fights at California secondary schools from 2001 to 2019.

Khimberly’s death, however, is a stark reminder of the devastating and disproportionate toll bullying can have on students and their families.

“Schools are now more aware than they used to be, and there’s more interventions, there’s more programs,” Astor said. “I think school sites are very serious [about addressing bullying], because it could cause physical harm and unfortunately, in this situation, even death.”

He noted LAUSD faces more challenges tackling the issue than other districts — pointing to the size and diversity of its student body as well as high rates of teacher and administrator turnover.

Tanya Ortiz Franklin, an LAUSD board member, said that although she is unable to comment on Khimberly’s case due to pending litigation, she does not believe that bullying is a major issue across the district.

“For the one family whose child is being bullied, absolutely, it’s a huge problem,” she said. “But if you look in the grand scheme of half a million children in a city that has a lot of diversity that includes not just different cultural upbringings but also different opinions about what is right and what is wrong, you could anticipate a lot more conflict.”

Ortiz Franklin, who chairs the district’s School Safety and Climate Committee, said the highest rates of bullying and fights are seen at the middle school level, where students are still learning how to cope with negative emotions.

She noted that the district had worked to address this through new measures such as a cellphone ban, which is intended not only to increase classroom focus but also to foster face-to-face relationship building and a sense of community. She also pointed to efforts to teach social and emotional learning, so students learn how to process negative emotions using words, not violence.

There were 5,636 fights and other instances of aggression reported at L.A. Unified in the 2024-25 school year and 5,707 in the prior school year, according to data presented at a committee meeting in November.

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

These figures were pulled from the Incident System Tracking Accountability Report — an imprecise, but useful, metric that tracks instances of fights, drugs, threats and weapons on campus. These reports are typically generated by school administrators who have discretion over what gets filed but can face repercussions if an unreported incident later leads to problems.

Overall numbers and districtwide trends mean little to Khimberly’s family.

They say bullying and physical violence are an accepted part of the culture at Reseda Charter High and filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the district on Monday alleging that the school failed to take reports of bullying seriously. The principal did not respond to a request for comment, and the district spokesperson said it cannot comment on pending litigation.

From left, Khimberly’s sister Sharon, aunt Liz Trugman, mother Elma Chuquipa Sanchez and father Jesus Alfredo Zavaleta Tafur meet with their attorney. 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 taking on the case, his firm, Panish Shea Ravipudi, has been inundated with calls about bullying at LAUSD.

“Every day, including today, we get so many calls from parents, mainly, but also from some teachers saying this is such a pervasive epidemic at the district that something needs to get 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 bright future for their daughters.

Khimberly dreamed of becoming a doctor. She loved swimming in their apartment pool, riding her bike, playing volleyball and basketball, singing and drawing.

Khimberly Zavaleta Chuquipa, 12, was born in Lima, Perú.

(Soudi Jiménez / L.A. Times en Español)

“She was a very lovely girl, very kind, and very much loved by everyone,” her father, Jesus Alfredo Zavaleta Tafur, said in Spanish. “It is such a beautiful thing to have been her father.”

Her mother said that the bullying of her daughters had been going on for more than a year, and that she complained to the school so frequently, officials knew her by name. Since Khimberly’s death, she said, several other parents have come forward to hear and share stories of how their children had been tormented on campus.

She said the school’s lack of action was what spurred her family to 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 alleges that Khimberly would still be alive if the district had taken steps such as promptly documenting and investigating reports of bullying, disciplining the students who previously bullied Khimberly and Sharon and implementing anti-bullying measures at school. The family also accuses the school of failing to adequately staff and monitor the hallway area where the Feb. 17 incident took place.

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

Chuquipa Sanchez hopes the lawsuit 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. “It wasn’t fair that they [the bullies] continued going to school and my daughters suffered. One had to change schools and we buried the other.”

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