Photo: Tom Green County Sheriff's Office
A Texas preschool teacher faces serious allegations after a lawsuit claims she terrorized a 4-year-old girl in her care, while school administrators failed to intervene despite watching surveillance footage of the alleged abuse.
Justice Thomas, a teacher at Trinity Lutheran School and Early Childhood Center in San Angelo, Texas, allegedly screamed at, pushed, and dragged a preschooler across the classroom on March 24, 2021, according to an amended lawsuit filed by The Button Law Firm on behalf of parents Patrick and Mellissa Killingsworth. The complaint states Thomas also locked the child alone in a dark closet, threatened to call police on the preschooler, and told her that her parents wanted her to go to jail. Every incident was captured on the school's surveillance cameras.
San Angelo police received a complaint regarding the alleged physical abuse on March 24, 2021. According to the complaint report, the child's mother received a voicemail from Thomas regarding her child's behavior that day. When the mother addressed the school about the voicemail, Thomas denied leaving one. School administration later told the mother that Thomas had yelled at, pushed, and pulled her child by the arm.
The lawsuit alleges Trinity Lutheran School administrators watched recorded footage of the abuse the day it happened but failed to intervene, remove Thomas from the classroom, or inform the parents for five days. The amended complaint claims this silence violated Texas childcare laws requiring immediate reporting of such incidents. The suit also states that hours of surveillance footage from the preschool classroom on the day of the alleged abuse are now missing.
Text messages cited in the lawsuit reveal the school's director and principal received more than four months of explicit warnings from Thomas that she was approaching a mental health breakdown. In one message, she called a "meltdown at work" her "worst nightmare." The complaint alleges the school continued sending her back to her classroom, prioritizing staffing over child safety.
On Tuesday (March 30, 2021), the child's mother viewed surveillance footage of the incident at the school. The video showed Thomas putting the child in a dark closet and closing the door, according to police reports. The child appeared scared and was crying and screaming for her parents. All twelve other students who witnessed the incident were not harmed.
Thomas told police she does not recall all events from that day, including allegedly assaulting the child. She claimed she believes she had some sort of medical issues that caused memory loss and aggressive behavior toward the child.
Thomas was arrested on April 13, 2021, and charged with knowingly and intentionally causing bodily injury to a child.
"Trinity Lutheran School's leadership ignored state childcare laws and failed to stop a 4-year-old girl and her preschool classmates from being terrorized by a teacher while under the school's watch," says daycare injury attorney Russell Button of The Button Law Firm. "This is what happens when a school prioritizes its staffing schedule over a child's safety, then tries to bury the truth instead of owning up to their multiple failures that broke the law."
The parents of the child released a statement emphasizing they believe the school handled the situation appropriately and by the book, reporting themselves to the state before sitting down with the family to review what they found.
The case is Patrick and Mellissa Killingsworth, Individually and as parents and next friends of P.K., a minor child, vs. Evangelical Lutheran Trinity Congregation, Cause No. D230014C in the District Court of Tom Green County, Texas. Trinity Lutheran School declined to comment on the matter.