A former student is suing a San Jose school district and county education administrators for failing to protect her from sexual abuse by a science camp employee, adding new allegations against the man already serving a lengthy prison sentence for similar crimes against other children.
The lawsuit, filed in Santa Clara County Superior Court this week, comes more than five years after abuse allegations involving Edgar Covarrubias-Padilla, a former night manager at the Walden West science camp, first surfaced. It also raises new questions about exactly how long Covarrubias-Padilla may have been preying on campers and how many former campers may have been affected.
Walden West, a revered institution operated by the Santa Clara County Office of Education, has for decades provided weeklong environmental science programs to South Bay fifth- and sixth-graders at its sites in Cupertino and Saratoga. Covarrubias-Padilla — known as “Papa Bear” at the camp — was a live-in staffer who often was the only adult on duty at night overseeing hundreds of elementary-school children every year.
The former student — referred to as “Jane McDoe” in the new lawsuit — was attending Ida Jew Academy, a San Jose charter school operated by the Mount Pleasant School District, when she attended Walden West in 2013. During her stay there as a 10-year-old, Covarrubias-Padilla allegedly molested her on three separate nights, according to the suit.
Covarrubias-Padilla is currently serving an 18-year sentence in Kern County’s California Correctional Institution after he pleaded no contest in 2017 to more than a dozen felony charges for sexually abusing two campers and distributing child pornography.
The former camp supervisor was arrested in 2015 — about two years after the abuse outlined in the new lawsuit allegedly occurred — for having child pornography. Then, two boys — a 10-year-old from Santa Clara County and a boy from Stanislaus County — came forward and reported to authorities that Covarrubias-Padilla had molested them. Authorities found more than 20,000 pornographic images and videos of children on his laptop, cellphone and cloud accounts, which he was distributing under the email handle “pbear.”
An earlier investigation by this news organization found that he exaggerated his work history, that the county never checked his references and that the camp failed to follow its rules that no adult may be alone with a child. The investigation also revealed that a decade earlier, another live-in staffer at the camp was convicted of molesting a child he met online, but parents were never informed about that incident.
On top of that, in the wake of Covarrubias-Padilla’s arrest, the county office of education initially assured parents that he had no contact with children — a claim that was quickly proven false and led to the departure of the camp’s then-director. It also came out that Covarrubias-Padilla was suspected of child-porn activity for several months by the Department of Homeland Security, but the agency did not notify local officials and authorities until after he had molested his most recent victim.
The discoveries at the time prompted serious backlash from parents and child advocates over the county and camp’s lax oversight, ill-advised practices and failure to alert parents of potential danger.
The lawsuit filed this week against Covarrubias-Padilla, the Mount Pleasant School District and the county office of education argues that the defendants acted negligently when they failed to provide adequate supervision, to properly hire and train its staff and to implement reasonable safeguards to protect children from predators like Covarrubias-Padilla, who was allowed to be alone with students behind closed doors. The suit also alleges that the county and district knew that Covarrubias-Padilla was under investigation for sex crimes involving children yet never informed the child or her parents.
Both the school district and county office of education declined to comment, citing pending litigation and noting that they had not yet seen the complaint.
Morgan Stewart, the former students’ attorney, said because of the lack of oversight he believes Covarrubias-Padilla may have abused “dozens upon dozens” of children during his time at the camp. Stewart is prepared for other alleged victims to come forward during litigation.
“People like this don’t just start with one victim, they keep going,” he said. “And I think as long as this guy was on the site, he thought he could get away with whatever we wanted.”
By failing to follow numerous safety and protection requirements outlined in state and federal law, the suit claims that the defendants made Padilla’s conduct and multiple “red flags” harder to detect and thwarted the parents’ ability to intervene and prevent the abuse.
Such actions, the lawsuit claims, were motivated by a desire to conceal wrongful acts, avoid scandal and “to protect the reputation of defendants and to protect the monetary support of defendants while fostering an environment where such abuse could continue to occur.”
“It is upon information, and therefore belief, that the sexual assault perpetrated upon the plaintiff as a child, was the result of a ‘cover-up’ or a ‘concerted effort to hide evidence relating to childhood sexual assault,’” the suit reads.
As a result, the former student has suffered “extreme and extensive” physical, psychological and emotional damages,” including anxiety, depression and multiple attempted suicides, according to the lawsuit. She is seeking an unspecified amount of money to cover the damages she has endured and will face in the future because of the abuse.
