What happened to you at a Riverside Unified school was not okay.

Liberty Elementary. Chemawa Middle. North High. Poly High. Taft Elementary. Five campuses, different decades, and the same school district on the other side of every one of those cases. Riverside Unified has paid twice for one after-school computer lab at Liberty, $6.2 million in 2018 and $13.7 million in 2022, and a man who taught fourth grade at Taft in the late 1990s was charged in 2021 with what he is accused of doing to a pupil. So if you went to one of those schools, or to any other campus the district runs, and a teacher, an aide or a coach did something to you: this is about you. It was written for you.

WatchingSeptember 2026: the criminal case against a former Taft Elementary fourth-grade teacher, filed in Riverside County Superior Court in November 2021, has had no public update since his December 3, 2021 arraignment, and we are checking the docket. The Liberty Elementary cases are settled. The questions below work for anyone, any campus.

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This applies to you no matter what

Maybe your school isn't one of the five above and never once made the news. That matters less than you'd think, honestly. Every case on this page was brought against the district, not a campus, and the district runs more than forty schools. Yours is one of them.
Your family never sued, even when other families at your school did. Thirteen Liberty families settled, three in 2018 and ten in 2022. Their settlement settles nothing for you.
You told somebody, a teacher, the principal, your mom called the office, and nothing happened. That is what the Liberty complaints allege: a mother phoned the principal as early as the 2014-15 school year, a girl told the principal twice the year after. The district disputes it. Either way, it's the heart of a case against a district, not a reason to stay quiet.
It was the late nineties. A fourth-grader at Taft in 1999 is 36 or so now, and California's clock for someone that age hasn't run. Your birth year matters more than the year it happened, and the deadline section explains why.
What happened was less than what got read out in a courtroom, or you honestly can't put a word on it. Nobody expects a nine-year-old to have the words. Nobody expects the adult to have found them since.
You're a parent, a sibling, a friend asking for someone who can't. Reach out anyway. And for anything on or after January 1, 2024, there is no deadline at all.

The Riverside Unified record: the pleas, the lawsuits, the settlements, the pending charge, and when

None of what follows is ours. Prosecutors wrote it, and judges, and the families' complaints, and the reporters who sat in the Riverside Hall of Justice, and we link to every line. Where a sentence says a complaint alleges something, that is all it is; the pleas and the sentences are the courts'. And because this page covers a whole district: the criminal records and settlements below name Liberty Elementary, Chemawa Middle School, North High School, Riverside Poly High School and Taft Elementary. Any other Riverside Unified school is covered because the same district ran it, not because a separate record on that campus is cited here.

January 23, 2015

Andrea Cardosa had been a physical education teacher and basketball coach at Chemawa Middle School in the late 1990s, and by 2014 an assistant principal in Alhambra, when a former Chemawa student phoned her, recorded the call and posted it. Riverside police reopened an investigation they had started in 1998. Charged with 16 felonies, Cardosa pleaded guilty in Riverside County Superior Court to three counts of lewd acts on a minor, two of them on a child under 14, over two girls: the Chemawa student, from about age 12, and a girl at two Perris schools in 2009 and 2010. Ten years in state prison. ABC7.

March 10, 2015

The Chemawa student had sued Riverside Unified and Cardosa in August 2014. Her complaint alleged the district knew, or should have known, and that nobody who was required to report did. Judge Sunshine Sykes threw out one claim, that a public entity had ratified the abuse, and let the rest go forward, including the count for failing to report suspected child abuse. The district denied any wrongdoing. Press-Enterprise.

November 23, 2016

Riverside Unified and Cardosa settled that case out of court. The terms are confidential; the notice of settlement is on the docket and her lawyer said she was satisfied. The suit had claimed the district negligently kept the teacher on after complaints about her closeness with students. Nothing was admitted. Press-Enterprise.

December 3, 2018

Fernando Figueroa was a technology aide in the after-school program at Liberty Elementary, arrested in February 2017 and, by then, indicted by a grand jury on 25 felony counts over 11 girls. Riverside Unified agreed to pay $6.2 million to the families of three of them, 8 to 11 years old, abused in the school's technology lab, before Judge Sunshine Sykes. What the suit alleged: that a school psychologist destroyed her notes of what children had told her, and that the principal and another employee tried to create false records showing he had been supervised. The district did not admit liability. MyNewsLA / City News Service.

August and September 2019

Three more suits over Figueroa, one in April, one in August and a fourth filed September 19, 2019 in Riverside Superior Court, naming the district, Liberty's principal Esther Garcia and other staff. The allegations: that during the 2015-16 school year one girl told her mother and told Garcia twice, that another told a fourth-grade teacher who passed it to Garcia, that no report to police followed, and that during a state audit in early 2016 the school falsified records showing Figueroa was supervised. The district's spokesman said it remained shocked and disappointed and that Figueroa had passed a Department of Justice background check. Press-Enterprise.

November 15 and December 13, 2019

Four girls' statements were read in court that December. One of them said: what happened, it doesn't define me. By then Figueroa had pleaded guilty, in Riverside County Superior Court, to three of the 25 counts against him, two of lewd acts on a child under 14 and one of oral copulation with a child 10 or younger, and Judge Jeffrey J. Prevost had given him 20 years to life. Press-Enterprise.

February 26, 2021

Two more campuses, the same year. Poly first: Desmen Granger, an assistant girls' basketball coach there, had been charged in May 2020 with five misdemeanors over three players, and one of those players was suing the district. Then North High. Since November 2018 the career-technical instructor there had been a man named John Torrez, who, and this matters later, wasn't a district employee at all. The Riverside County Office of Education employed him and had assigned him to the campus. March 2020: Riverside police arrested him, over a relationship with a student. The suit that was announced named Riverside Unified and the county office both. The lawyer in the North High case called it one more sad chapter in the district's history. The district did not comment. MyNewsLA / City News Service.

May 28 and October 8, 2021

The plea Torrez entered before Judge Gail O'Rane in the Riverside Hall of Justice covered four felony counts from 2019, two of oral copulation of a minor and two of unlawful intercourse with a person under 18, and he entered it over the prosecutors' objection. The judge overruled them, and in October the sentence came down as two years of felony probation plus nine months in a work-release program. The civil case against the district and the county office was filed by the same firm that handled Liberty. MyNewsLA / City News Service.

November 9 and December 3, 2021

Paul Edward Lowe taught fourth grade at Taft Elementary from 1997 to 2002 and coached youth soccer. A man of 32 went to Riverside police and said Lowe had sexually abused him when he was in fourth grade; most of it happened away from school, and some of it, according to police, on campus. Lowe was 61 by then, living in Corona. Riverside police arrested him, and at his arraignment in Riverside County Superior Court, Judge David Gunn presiding, the charge sheet ran to 14 felony counts of aggravated sexual assault of a child. Not guilty, he said. Bail, $5 million. There was more from police: he'd resigned from Taft in 2002, he already had a Los Angeles County conviction, for sexually assaulting a minor, and they believed there were other victims. Charged, not convicted, and as of this writing no plea, trial or dismissal has been reported. Patch.

April 19, 2022

Ten more former Liberty students, 7 to 11 when it happened, settled with Riverside Unified for $13.7 million. Their lawyers said the complaints put the first report to district employees in the 2014-15 school year and that testimony had shown Figueroa found alone with children behind locked doors with the lights off. The district answered that the failure-to-report allegations had never been substantiated in court, that his background check was the standard one, and that the settlement resolved disputed claims with the students' interests in mind. Press-Enterprise.

May 9, 2022

Granger's trial was set to begin that morning. Instead he pleaded no contest, in Superior Court in Riverside, to three misdemeanors, two counts of using offensive words in a public place and one of lewd conduct, and the sexual-battery and annoying-a-child counts went away, dismissed. Ten days of work release, a year of probation, and an order to stay away from Poly High. Misdemeanors, and that is how this page describes them. The 2021 civil suit by one player against the district and an assistant coach alleges the head coach gathered the girls and told them their accusations could have serious consequences for Granger; the district, in its answer, denied it was culpable. Press-Enterprise.

We checked this on September 15, 2026, and the newest thing in it is from May 9, 2022. When something new gets filed or decided, it goes in here within 72 hours, with the link.

Who can be held responsible in a Riverside Unified School District lawsuit

The district. Not the aide, or not only. Figueroa and Cardosa answered for themselves in criminal court, and neither of them is who the families sued. They sued the Riverside Unified School District, the public body that hired these people, put them in a classroom or a computer lab, and, the complaints allege, was told and left them there. That is the theory in every case above, and it is the one the district has paid on, twice at Liberty, once at Chemawa, without a trial. A teacher answers for what he did. A district that was told, and did nothing, answers for everyone he reached afterward. The district, for its part, says the failure-to-report allegations were never proven in court, and no court has found that it knew.

Riverside Unified is a public entity, which changes three things a lawyer will walk you through. There are no punitive damages against a school district in California, ever; that is Government Code 818. There is no cap on what a jury can award for what was actually done to you. And you do not file a government claim first, whatever year it was; childhood sexual abuse claims go straight to court. One wrinkle, and we want to be exact about it: the North High instructor was employed by the Riverside County Office of Education and assigned to the campus, and the 2021 suit named both the district and the county office. A lawyer sorts out who answers for what.

We have built a page for Taft Elementary on its own, because the record there is a criminal charge that is still open, and if Taft is your school you can read it too. Chemawa, Liberty, North and Poly are covered here. The questions are the same either way.

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

Until you turn 40, or five years from the day you understood what it did to you, whichever is later. That is California's rule for anyone abused as a minor before 2024, Code of Civil Procedure section 340.11, and it is why we ask whether you were born in 1987 or later. If you were, the door is open on age alone, whichever campus and whichever year. Do the math on Taft: fourth grade any year from 1997 through 2002 means a birth year after 1987, every one of them. Liberty, obviously, later still.

Because the district is a public body there is one more rule, and here it helps you. You do not have to file a government claim with Riverside 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 does not apply to childhood sexual abuse, and it hasn't mattered which year it was since 2020. Born before 1987, and the Chemawa students of the late nineties are, the fortieth birthday has come or is close, and what remains is the discovery rule plus a showing that the district knew or should have known. Whether that showing can be made on your facts is a lawyer's call, not ours. 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, plainly. If you were at a Riverside Unified school any time from the mid-1990s on, you almost certainly still have time, and a kid who was at Liberty in 2016 has decades. What doesn't keep is the rest of it. Who else was in the lab. Which parent called the office. What the file said. That is the part worth one call now.

Your situation still qualifies even if

You never told a soul. Not a parent, not a spouse, nobody. The Chemawa student carried it 16 years before she picked up the phone.
When the police asked, back in 1998, you said nothing had happened, and so did the Chemawa student that same year; in the end it made no difference.
You liked him. He was the aide who let you stay late in the computer lab, the teacher who coached your soccer team. That is in the record at two of these schools, and it is part of how it worked.
You figure the families who settled got everyone's share. No. Their share was theirs, and the district was back at the table over Liberty in 2018 and again in 2022 because more families had come forward.
The charge against your teacher never went anywhere that you heard of. A criminal case and a civil case are two different doors, and yours doesn't need his to finish first.
You live somewhere else now. Half the class of whatever-year does, and the firm we work with handles California cases wherever you are.

Schools covered

Liberty Elementary, on the city's Eastside. Chemawa Middle School, off Central Avenue. John W. North High School in the north of the city, and Riverside Polytechnic High School on Victoria Avenue. Taft Elementary has a page of its own, at /taft-elementary-riverside-survivors, since the criminal case there is still open. Then everything else Riverside Unified runs: more than forty campuses, magnets and after-school programs, Arlington to Canyon Crest. Was it a different district in Riverside County, Alvord, say, or Moreno Valley, or Jurupa? The questions still work. Answer them and say where.

Questions people are asking

Can I sue Riverside Unified School District for sexual abuse by a teacher, all these years later?

Former students already have, at Chemawa, at Liberty, at North and at Poly, and the district settled the Liberty and Chemawa cases rather than take them to a jury. Whether you can depends mostly on when you were born and when it happened, which is what the questions above sort out. Which school matters less than you'd think: the defendant is the same.

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 first call and not for the case review either.

How much has Riverside Unified paid in sexual abuse settlements?

Two public figures, both over Liberty Elementary: $6.2 million to three families in December 2018 and $13.7 million to ten former students in April 2022. The Chemawa settlement in 2016 was confidential. Those are the district's numbers. They are not a promise about anyone's case; no two are alike.

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.

It was Taft in 1999, or Chemawa in 1997. Is it too late?

Taft, almost certainly not: a fourth-grader in 1999 was born around 1989 and is under 40, so the door is open on age. Chemawa in 1997 is closer to the line; past 40 it turns on the discovery rule and what the district knew, and a lawyer has to weigh that. Either way, one call sorts it, and the Taft case is being watched right now.

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.