The city has agreed to pay $2.7 million to settle a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the mother of Avonte Oquendo, the autistic student whose body was found in the East River several months after he fled from his Queens school, the Daily News has learned.
The suit accused officials at the school and the NYPD school safety division of negligence for failing to monitor the exit doors and not properly supervising the non-verbal 14-year-old boy, who had a known history of being a flight risk.
“The loss of a child is a tragedy no family should endure,” said Nicholas Paolucci, a spokesman for the city Law Department, “and hopefully the resolution of this legal matter will bring some measure of solace to Avonte’s family.”
“The Department of Education has taken a number of steps and is dedicated to taking every measure possible to prevent something like this from occurring again,” the spokesman added.
Avonte’s mom Vanessa Fontaine had spearheaded massive searches for her son after he ran out of the Riverview School in Long Island City undetected on Oct. 4, 2013.
Hordes of volunteers joined cops in searching subway stations and tunnels because the teen was fascinated by trains, and used social media to share information.
His badly decomposed body was found washed up on a beach in Queens three months later.
“No amount of money can ever heal the pain or somehow lessen the loss,” Fontaine said in a statement.
“I only hope the Department of Education and the city of New York take the sorely needed steps to properly care for all their students, especially the ones with special needs.”
Fontaine’s lawyer David Perecman said the civil case was unusual in many respects, most notably in that it is unknown what happened to Avonte after he left the school.
His body was so badly decomposed the medical examiner was not able to determine a cause of death.
“We don’t know how he got in the East River, we don’t even know if he drowned,” Perecman told The News.
“That put a very big hitch in the case because we would have had to prove what happened.
“The city and its departments make gross mistakes, they don’t address the problems, then dole out significant sums of money to make it go away.”
But the teen’s death did result in “Avonte’s Law” to prevent similar tragedies by installing alarms on school doors that would be triggered when opened.
Sens. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) have also proposed a federal law to provide funding for GPS tracking devices for special needs children.
