A former student in the Rochester City School District filed a lawsuit on June 2 claiming an elementary school teacher sexually abused him decades ago.

The lawsuit, filed in state Supreme Court in Monroe County, N.Y., is the 14th to be leveled against the Rochester school district under the state’s Child Victims Act, according to the Democrat and Chronicle newspaper.

Rochester School District Sexual Assault Case

The alleged victim was in second-grade when the abuse took place in 2000, according to published court documents. The boy told his mother that his teacher, David Heil, had assaulted him and the mother reported it to school administrators not long afterward. School administrators reportedly told the child’s mother that Heil would be removed, but six years later she found out he was teaching at another elementary school in the Rochester school district.

Upon discovering that Heil was still teaching, the alleged victim’s mother contacted police. Heil was charged with two counts of first-degree sexual abuse for which he was convicted at trial. He served two-and-a-half years in prison before an appellate court overturned his conviction. In June 2010, Heil avoided a retrial by pleading guilty to a single count of felony sexual abuse, the Democrat and Chronicle reported.

Rochester School District’s Reaction

When informed of the allegations against Heil, the Rochester school district suspended him, but City School District Attorney Michael Looby later testified that as far as he knew no school officials reported the incident to police or Child Protective Services. Instead, Looby and then Superintendent Clifford Janey notified New York’s Department of Education of the “moral failure.”

It is unclear whether the state education department conducted an investigation.

Heil was reinstated as a teacher and transferred to another elementary school.

The lawsuit claims that the Rochester school district “knew or should have known it was not safe for children to be alone with Heil.” Heil is not listed as a defendant in the lawsuit.

Other Allegations and Lawsuits

Heil is the fifth Rochester school district employee accused of sexual abuse in the 14 lawsuits filed under New York’s Child Victims Act. Ten of the lawsuits involve a former music teacher alleged to have abused teenage students at the district’s East and West high schools in the 1960s and 1970s, according to the Democrat and Chronicle.

A newspaper investigation found that the teacher in those cases was allowed to resign and “district administrators did not report his conduct to police or other authorities after a woman told them he’d raped her.”

The remaining three lawsuits filed against the Rochester school district under the Child Victims Act involved two other elementary school teachers and a school employee, alleging incidents that occurred in the 1980s.

The New York State Legislature passed the Child Victims Act in January 2019 and extended the statute of limitations for child sexual abuse survivors to bring civil lawsuits against their abusers until the victim turns 55 years old. Previously, victims had up to five years from the time they turned 18.

The law also created a one-year lookback window for abuse victims, giving them one year from the date the new law took effect to file a civil lawsuit. The deadline was to be Aug. 14 but in May, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo ordered a five-month extension of the deadline due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

Weeks later, the state legislature approved a one-year extension of the deadline, giving child sexual abuse victims until August 14, 2021, to file suit, the Associated Press reported. The bill is awaiting Gov. Cuomo’s signature.

This article is not legal advice. It is presented
for informational purposes only.