What happened to you at Lindbergh Middle School was not okay.

If you went to Lindbergh you know the building: Market Street, North Long Beach, three grades of kids. What you may not know is that a history teacher there, Mark Santo, had a warning put in his file by his own principal in 2013 over his Instagram contact with female students, and that the district moved him to a high school anyway. He's serving 80 years to life now. A Long Beach jury convicted him in June 2023, one of the counts being what happened to a student in the 2012-13 school year in a little room off the back of his classroom, where he kept a couch, and seven former students are suing Long Beach Unified over what came after that 2013 warning. If you were a Lindbergh kid in those years, or any year, and an adult at that school crossed a line: this page was written for you.

WatchingSeptember 2026: the seven-plaintiff case against Long Beach Unified over its former Lindbergh and Jordan teacher (Los Angeles Superior Court, 23STCV31632, filed December 27, 2023) is pending, with no ruling, trial date or settlement on the public docket at its last refresh in May 2026. The criminal case is over: conviction upheld May 2, 2025, review denied July 9, 2025. The questions below work now.

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6 questions. Your answers are private and go to one person.

Looking for the page about the whole district? Long Beach Unified School District survivors: Lindbergh, Jordan, Rogers, Jackie Robinson Academy, Cabrillo and Burcham on one page, with the district's full record.

This applies to you no matter what

You weren't the girl in the criminal case. One Lindbergh count went to a jury. The seven who sued attended Lindbergh and/or Jordan, and the 2013 reprimand was about female students, plural, on Instagram. Nobody has ever counted everyone he reached.
It never went as far as what was read out in court. A message, a hug that went on too long, being kept back in the room behind the classroom. The complaint lists the couch and the seclusion among the red flags it says the district had in front of it.
You told somebody at Lindbergh. A counselor, the office, your mom called. The school had a written warning in his file by 2013 and he was still teaching in the district five years later; what happened after someone spoke is the heart of the seven plaintiffs' case.
He was your teacher in seventh grade and it happened years later, somewhere else. One of the three in the criminal case is exactly that: she met him as her seventh-grade history teacher. A lawyer has to look at the dates, but don't rule yourself out.
You're 26 or 28 now and figure it's done with. California's clock for anyone abused as a minor runs to your 40th birthday at the earliest, and for the 2012-13 Lindbergh kids that's around 2038.
Or you're asking for somebody else, your kid, your friend, the girl who sat two desks over, because she can't. Reach out anyway.

The Lindbergh Middle School record: the reprimand, the charge, the conviction, the lawsuit, and when

None of what's below is ours. The Long Beach Post pried the district's file loose with a public-records request; a jury convicted, three appellate justices wrote it down; seven women's lawyers filed a complaint. Every line links to where it came from, and where a line comes from that complaint it is an allegation and we say so. This page holds what the record says about Lindbergh. The district's wider record, Jordan High, Jackie Robinson Academy, Cabrillo, Burcham, is on the Long Beach Unified page and not retold here.

2013

Mark Santo was teaching history at Lindbergh Middle School when the principal wrote him up. He'd been "liking" female students' photos on Instagram from an account called @msanto69. Keep it to approved school channels, the reprimand said, change the handle, and then this: "Continuing to use Instagram with students and the user name 'msanto69' puts you at risk for possible sexual harassment allegations." It is the earliest document Long Beach Unified released to the Long Beach Post's public-records requests in 2020; much of the rest was withheld. He kept his job. His next classroom was at Jordan High, for nearly four years, with the athletic department thrown in. Long Beach Post, from LBUSD records.

May and July 2020

The first charge, in May 2020, had nothing to do with Lindbergh: a lewd act on a child under 14, a 13-year-old family friend at his home in 2015. By July there were six felonies, involving three former students from Jordan or Lindbergh, two of them minors at the time. One of the new counts was Lindbergh's: a girl abused in 2012 and 2013, while he was a teacher there. The other, a former student, 18 by then, at his home. He pleaded not guilty to all of it. The district said it had not been told about the two new students and "took appropriate action when he did work here." Long Beach Post.

June 5, 2023

The trial at the Long Beach courthouse ran a week; the jury was back in under a day with guilty on two counts of lewd acts on a child under 14, on forcible sexual penetration, on forcible oral copulation and on two counts of assault with intent to commit those acts, plus a true finding that there were multiple victims. The Lindbergh student had testified about the 2012-13 school year: he touched her inappropriately, she said, under the guise of comforting her. The prosecutor's account of the method: earn a girl's trust, then get her alone in his classroom or his home, "where he has the control and they don't have any." He was taken into custody in the courtroom. Long Beach Post.

October 17, 2023

"You are a predator, Mr. Santo," Judge Laura Laesecke said, and gave him 80 years to life. He had asked to leave the courtroom rather than hear the three young women; she called that cowardly and had him brought back for the sentence. One of them told the court she'd felt the universe was doing her a favor when she met him in her classes at Lindbergh Middle School, and then learned that "everything came at a cost." The judge, about the district: "You were allowed to resign and my understanding is you decided to teach again." Long Beach Post.

December 27, 2023

Seven former students, Jane Does 1 through 7, sued Long Beach Unified School District, Mark Anthony Santo and his wife Jennifer Santo in Los Angeles Superior Court, case 23STCV31632, Department 11 at the Spring Street Courthouse, designated provisionally complex. The docket's own summary of the complaint: former students of LBUSD schools "including Lindbergh Middle School, Rogers Middle School, and Jordan High School." At the docket's last public refresh, May 23, 2026, it showed no ruling, no trial date and no settlement. Docket.

December 31, 2023

What the complaint says about Lindbergh, as the Long Beach Post reported it. The district, it alleges, "ignored and concealed the sexual abuse of plaintiffs and others by Mark Santo that had already occurred"; the red flags it lists include his lewd electronic messages to students, his ability to seclude pupils in private areas, and his "sitting and lying down with young females on a couch in his classroom." One Lindbergh plaintiff, it alleges, was groomed with talk about her family and her private life, with hugs, with being called his daughter and told that if it were up to him he'd give her a better life; he passed her, it says, though she failed her exams and didn't do the work. Sexual abuse and battery, sex trafficking, negligence, conspiracy, public-entity liability for failing to perform a mandatory duty: those are the counts pleaded. The district wouldn't comment, the litigation being pending, and it has admitted none of it. Long Beach Post.

May 2 and July 9, 2025

Upheld. Three justices of the Second District Court of Appeal left the convictions standing and vacated only the two assault counts, duplicates of the more serious ones. The opinion runs 18 pages, and it's where the Lindbergh classroom gets set down plainly: a small room at the back of it, a couch, one of his middle-school history students resting on that couch in the 2012-13 school year, and him getting onto it and, in her report, "cuddling her from behind." The young woman he assaulted years later is in there too; she'd met him, the justices note, as her seventh-grade history teacher and grown to regard him as a parent figure. The California Supreme Court declined to review it on July 9, and he is in state prison. Long Beach Post.

We checked this on September 15, 2026, and the newest thing in it is from May 2 and July 9, 2025. When something new gets filed or decided, it goes in here within 72 hours, with the link.

Who can be held responsible in a Lindbergh Middle School lawsuit

Not the school. Lindbergh Middle School isn't a body you can sue; it has no budget and no lawyers of its own. The defendant is the Long Beach Unified School District, the public agency that hired him, put a written warning in his file in 2013 about his Instagram contact with female students, and then, the seven plaintiffs say, moved him to a high school and in 2018 let him resign under an agreement that kept the allegations from his next employer. A teacher answers for what he did, and Santo is, 80 years of it. A district answers for what it knew, or had every reason to know, about the students in between. That's the theory of the case on file. The district hasn't admitted it, and no court has found that it knew.

Because Long Beach Unified is a public body, two things change, and a lawyer will walk you through both. There is no cap on what a jury can award against it. And you don't file a government claim first, whatever year it was; childhood sexual abuse claims go straight to court.

The district has its own page, /long-beach-unified-survivors, with the record from six of its schools, and Jordan High, where he went after Lindbergh, has one too. Same defendant, same questions. This page exists because Lindbergh is the name people search, and because the 2012-13 count happened here.

Your deadline: the California statute of limitations for sexual abuse at a public middle school

Until you turn 40, or five years from the day you understood what it did to you, whichever is later. That's the rule (Code of Civil Procedure section 340.11) for anyone in California abused as a minor before 2024, and it's the reason the questions ask about 1987: born that year or later and the door is open on age alone. Every Lindbergh kid from 2012-13 is. Sixth, seventh or eighth grade that year means born around 1998 to 2000, so 40 doesn't come until 2038 to 2040, and nobody in that cohort is anywhere near out of time.

Because the district is a public body there's one more rule, and here it helps you. You do not file a government claim with Long Beach Unified first (Government Code 905(m); Code of Civil Procedure 340.11(s)); the six-month claim deadline that trips up other cases against a school district doesn't apply to childhood sexual abuse, whichever year it was. Born before 1987, the fortieth birthday has come or is close, and what's left is the discovery rule plus a showing that the district knew or should have known, with the certificates the statute asks for. Whether that can be shown on your facts is a lawyer's call. Not ours, and we won't pretend otherwise.

And if it happened on or after January 1, 2024, there's no deadline at all; that is Code of Civil Procedure 340.1. So the calendar isn't what runs out. What does is the rest: the messages, the screenshots, which parent called the office and who answered. That's the part worth one call now.

Your situation still qualifies even if

You never told a soul. Not a parent, not a friend, nobody. The Lindbergh count wasn't charged until July 2020, seven years on.
You liked him. He noticed you when nobody else did. Called you his daughter, said he'd give you a better life if it were up to him. That's in the complaint. The prosecutor told the jury it was the method.
It was his house, not a classroom. Two of the three young women in the criminal case were assaulted at his home.
It never went as far as what was in court, and you figure that means it doesn't count. The district's own reprimand was about Instagram likes.
You think the seven who sued got everyone's share. They filed for themselves, and their case hasn't been decided.
You live in Arizona, Nevada, anywhere now. The case is a California case wherever you are, and the firm we work with handles them wherever you live.

Schools covered

One school. Lindbergh Middle School, 1022 East Market Street, Long Beach, California 90805, in North Long Beach. Grades six through eight, 419 students in 2025-26, and Lindbergh STEM Academy on the sign and the district's site now; same campus, same district, a Long Beach Unified school then and now. His classroom and the room at the back of it, the yard, the after-school programs, anything that ran under Lindbergh's name. For the teacher in the record, 2012 to 2013. For anyone else, any year at all. If it was Jordan High, where he went next, go to /jordan-high-school-survivors. If it was Rogers Middle School, Jackie Robinson Academy, Cabrillo, Burcham or some other Long Beach Unified school, the district's page, /long-beach-unified-survivors, carries that record; same defendant either way. Answer the questions and say where.

Questions people are asking

Can I sue Lindbergh Middle School for sexual abuse by a teacher?

You sue the district, Long Beach Unified, not the school; a middle school isn't a legal entity. Seven former Lindbergh and Jordan students already have, in a case filed in December 2023 and still pending. Whether you can depends mostly on when you were born and when it happened, which is what the questions above sort out.

Was the Lindbergh teacher Mark Santo convicted?

Yes. A Long Beach jury convicted him on June 5, 2023, and the record above lists every count, including the one from his Lindbergh classroom in 2012-13. Eighty years to life followed that October. Then the appeal, which went nowhere (affirmed May 2, 2025), and then the state Supreme Court, which wouldn't take it (July 9).

Does any of this matter if I was at Lindbergh some other year?

It does. He taught in the district for 15 years; 2012-13 is the year on this page only because it's the one the conviction covers. And if it was a different adult at Lindbergh, in any year, the questions still work; the defendant is the same. Answer them and say when.

Don't I have to file a claim with the school district before I can sue?

No. California took that step out for childhood sexual abuse claims against public entities, and since 2020 it hasn't mattered which year the abuse happened. Your case goes to court, not to a claims office.

How much does a sexual abuse lawyer cost?

Here, nothing. Every case is on contingency, so the lawyer is paid only out of what is recovered, and if nothing is recovered you owe nothing. Not for the call, not for the review, not for the case.

Who sees your form

Kerim Eravci · Survivor Advocate · Not a lawyer

I was a victim, and I waited. Not because I didn't know what happened to me (I knew every day), but because I'd decided it was over, mine to carry, nobody's business. When I finally went looking for a lawyer, the answer came back in two words I'd never thought about: statute of limitations. My time had run out while I was busy getting through it.

What that has cost me since is a long story, and I'll tell you the whole thing in private, if you want it. The short version is the reason my name is on this page: I'm here to help people do what I wish I'd done, which is find out where you stand while the door's still open.

I'm not a lawyer. I read what you send, I call you once, on your terms, and nothing gets filed unless you say so. Ask sooner than I did.

Kerim Eravci is not an attorney. He's a survivor.

What happens next. Three steps, nothing more until you say so.

You answer 6 questions. Nothing is filed. Nothing starts.
A survivor calls you, once. Not a robot, not a call center. Someone who has been where you are.
You decide. You find out your options. If you want to stop there, you stop there.

How this works

ME2 Survivors Alliance protects the heart. Licensed California attorneys do the legal work. We are not lawyers and we don't pretend to be.

You never pay a dollar

Every case is on contingency. There is no charge for the call, the review, or the case. The firm is paid only out of a recovery, and if there is no recovery you owe nothing.