Judge signals Landon lawsuit over teens suicide will move forward

August 08, 2024

A Maryland judge indicated Friday he would likely allow a wrongful-death lawsuit against a Bethesda prep school to move forward, signaling a potential legal win for the parents of a teen seeking to hold the Landon School liable for their son’s suicide.

Montgomery County Circuit Judge Louis M. Leibowitz did not specifically issue a ruling. But after hearing three hours of arguments around Landon’s effort to dismiss the suit, he said he was inclined to keep at least some of the claims — namely those tied to negligence.

“I’m likely to let them move forward,” Leibowitz said.

As he spoke, Dawn and Scott Schnell watched and listened from the front row of an eighth floor courtroom in Rockville. Their son, Charlie, 16, took his life on March 27, 2022, at their home two weeks after his parents had withdrawn him from the all-boys institution.

Leibowitz made a special point to speak directly to the Schnells at the end of the hearing — a way to extend his sympathies while stressing they couldn’t affect his decisions.

“I can’t imagine what you have gone through,” he told them, adding, “These are legal issues that I have to make a judgment about.”

In the teen’s final days at the school, Landon officials accused him of drawing a racist image directed at Black people.

Leibowitz said he continues to consider whether stronger claims against Landon — that its actions amounted to “intentional infliction of emotional distress” on the family — should be dismissed. The judge said he likely will dismiss a claim that Landon’s actions violated Maryland’s Consumer Protection Act. “I would move forward,” he told attorneys on both sides, “as if that’s going away.”

On Friday, Landon’s attorneys advanced arguments they had previously filed in court papers. Two of the main ones: Landon could not have foreseen Schnell’s death because he had not expressed “suicidal intent or ideation,” and Landon’s legal duty to protect Schnell ended when he left the school.

Nothing from Friday’s hearing means a trial — set to begin in May 2025 — is imminent or that the Schnells would prevail. And before any trial, Landon’s attorneys will still have a chance to defeat the claims by seeking a summary judgment.

The hearing Friday, the first significant one in the litigation, didn’t address whether the allegations in the suit could be proven. It addressed arguments by Landon’s attorneys that, as a matter of law, the claims as stated in the lawsuit should be dismissed.

The central claims in the case are deeply debated.

In their lawsuit, attorneys for the Schnells contended that Landon officials ignored a series of mental health warning signs given off by their son, pushed him from the school in a rushed discipline process after he was accused of creating a racist drawing, and then failed to protect him from online bullying by his former classmates before he killed himself.

“Suicide was the foreseeable consequence,” the Schnells’s attorneys wrote in court filings, “of egregious failures by defendants to protect him from harm and to warn his parents of such harm.”

In court filings, Landon officials described Schnell’s final disciplinary matter at the school, while he was facing expulsion for earlier incidents, as extremely serious: He drew what they characterized as a violent image directed at Black people that he showed to a Black classmate. The allegation followed three incidents when Schnell was accused of using offensive language — in one case directed at a lacrosse coach.

A copy of the drawing, a description of it, or any explanation of what the teen may have been thinking when he drew it has not yet appeared in any legal filings. Landon’s attorneys, as part of court filings seeking to stay discovery pending resolution of their motion to dismiss, said that details of the “troubling drawing” would emerge if the case proceeds to trial and that wounds around the incident “should not be reopened lightly.”

An attorney for the Schnells declined to comment Friday after the hearing. Attorneys for Landon could not immediately be reached.

In the lawsuit, Schnell’s parents pointed to a journal entry he wrote for his English class as a sign of trouble the school should have alerted the family about.

“Right now, I’m tired and worried,” he wrote, describing illness that put him behind in school, how medicine zapped his motivation and fears over school shootings. But he also wrote that he was grateful for his loyal friends. “I’d sum everything up to being tired, in pain, thankful, and worried.”

Landon argued the journal indicated otherwise.

“A plain reading of the statements in [Schnell’s] classroom journal reveals understandable feelings of concern, but at no point does [he] state, or even imply, that he was contemplating suicide or self-harm,” their attorneys wrote in a brief filed with the court, saying that he also wrote of his friends and feeling hopeful.

Leibowitz is expected to issue a formal, written opinion soon.

If you or someone you know needs help now, call the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLGkecydZK%2BZX2d9c4COaWxoamRkuaK6w6ilZquTnbywuIysrKKbmZmybrjAsKquoaRisaavyKygqKZf