Former Charlotte Amalie High School principal Alcede Edwards asked a federal judge Monday to dismiss allegations from a former student who claimed school officials did nothing to stop former track coach and hall monitor Alfredo Bruce Smith’s sexual abuse.
Smith was arrested in 2021 and charged with molesting multiple minors and producing child pornography. In 2023, he pleaded guilty to raping, assaulting and exploiting multiple victims and other charges over a 15-year period. He was sentenced to 35 years in prison in April 2024.
Edwards and another former CAHS principal, April Petrus, resigned months ago amid an internal V.I. Education Department investigation into Smith’s allegedly unchecked crimes.
A former CAHS student identified in court documents as John Doe filed an expansive civil suit in December against those officials, the Education Department, the Board of Education, the Virgin Islands government, the Human Services Department, Smith, teacher Camelia Febres, and a score of “as-yet unidentified school officials, board members, teachers, coaches, social workers, administrators,” or other government employees who failed Smith’s victims in some way.
Edwards called the complaint a “shotgun pleading” in March and said he needed more information to mount a defense. The unnamed former student filed an amended complaint in April.
According to that complaint, the former student had already been abused by Smith three times when, in 2019, he complained to school officials about a planned school trip to Puerto Rico during which he would have to share a room with Smith. Officials called a meeting ahead of the trip, according to the complaint, but “did nothing to stop Smith’s intimidation of the Plaintiff for raising this issue.”
“The attendees and Defendants communicated to Plaintiff and his mother that since Plaintiff and his mother did not spend any money for the trip, Plaintiff had [sic] could not ‘call the shots,’” according to the complaint. The student’s mother brought her concerns to Edwards, Petrus and Febres, who “knowingly and deliberately approved of, sanctioned, and permitted this completely inappropriate dorm room arrangement wherein Plaintiff was trapped with Smith, a known abuser.”
“Predictably, once Plaintiff, a minor child, was trapped in the dorm room with Smith, Smith sexually assaulted Plaintiff,” according to the complaint.
Edwards’s attorney, Robert Leycock, argued Monday that the risk of harm to the former student “is attributable to Alfredo Bruce Smith’s vile, monstrous conduct” that began in 2006-7, “long before Mr. Edwards is alleged to have known that Smith was sexually abusing minor male students at CAHS.”
“Based on the allegations” in the first amended complaint, he argued, “Smith’s sexual abuse of students at CAHS was the status quo by the time Mr. Edwards became principal in or about June 2015.”
Leycock further argued that the complaint failed to show that Edwards discriminated against or showed disparate treatment toward the former student under the 14th Amendment’s “Equal Protection Clause” because the complaint didn’t show any indication that they had been treated differently than any other “similarly situated” student.
