What happened to you at Telfair Elementary was not okay.

Pacoima. The K-through-5 on Telfair Avenue, and a third-grade teacher the district moved there in October 1998, a year after a jury in a case about an eight-year-old couldn't agree on a verdict. If you were in that building any time up to 2011, the year they finally walked him out, the rest of this is for you, and it isn't long. Everything the courts and the district did about him afterward, the plea, the 25 years, the settlements Los Angeles Unified has paid former Telfair students in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2019 and 2020, is further down with a link on every line. The questions come first. They aren't hard.

WatchingSeptember 2026: the criminal case on this name closed with a plea in August 2012, the last Telfair settlement we have read was approved in May 2020, and nothing new naming Telfair or the teacher has been filed that we have found. What we watch is the district. L.A. Unified settled with 19 more former students from another of its schools on April 30, 2026, has borrowed up to $750 million to keep paying, and a Telfair claim would go into that same queue. The questions work now.

Free
Confidential
No obligation
You never pay a dollar

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

Looking for the page about the whole district? Los Angeles Unified School District survivors: Miramonte, Telfair, De La Torre, Portola and Birmingham on one page, with the district's full record.

This applies to you no matter what

You were in his class and your family never sued. At least two dozen Telfair families have, in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2019 and 2020. Their settlements settle nothing for you.
You weren't one of the 13 in the plea. Thirteen children, September 2006 through April 2011, is what he pleaded to, and that's all it is. Detectives talked to something like 22 students. The families who've settled since then include a boy who was never even in his class. That list was never meant to be everyone.
Your years came before 2006. He reported to Telfair on October 9, 1998, and the charges start eight years later. Nobody has said what the first eight years were like, and that's exactly the point.
What happened to you was less than what got read out in court, or you honestly can't say what it was. You were eight. Nobody expects you to have the words for it now.
You are 30 and it feels like a different life. California gives someone hurt as a child until their 40th birthday, and for a Telfair third-grader from 2000 that is most of a decade off. And if you're reading this for somebody else, a kid, a brother, a friend, that counts too.

The Telfair record: the transfer, the arrest, the plea, the settlements, and when

We didn't write what's below. LAPD detectives did, and the District Attorney, and Superior Court judges, and the district's own lawyers, and the reporters who sat through the hearings, and we link to every line. Where it says a complaint alleges something, that is all it is. The plea and the sentence are the court's.

1987 to October 9, 1998, as a 2012 complaint tells it

The first civil complaint came on July 12, 2012, in Los Angeles Superior Court: two former students, both eight at the time, against Paul Chapel III and the district. On the years before Telfair, its story goes like this. A 1987 civil case, sexual jokes and an explicit video shown to Chaminade High School students, which he lost; the district hired him anyway. Then 1997, and a prosecution for molesting an eight-year-old family friend; the day of the arrest, February 27, 1997, the district took him out of his classroom and gave him an office. Then the jury hung, the state lifted the suspension on his credential, and the district put him back in front of children, at Telfair, where he reported on October 9, 1998. That is the complaint's account, and the district never answered it in front of a jury. NBC News / NBC Los Angeles.

April 6 to October 8, 2011

A crime report for child annoying, April 6, 2011. LAPD's Sexually Exploited Child Unit took the case five days later and, the department says, he was immediately removed from the school. Detectives interviewed approximately 22 Telfair students. The arrest came October 8, 2011, bail set at $2.2 million, and by February the District Attorney had 16 counts of lewd act on a child on file, Penal Code 288(a), six children. The department also says it suggested the district delay discussing the case publicly, and did not ask it to withhold notification from parents. LAPD news release NR12076rb.

February 10, 2012

Four months after the arrest, days after the Miramonte arrests, and parents outside Telfair were telling reporters nobody had told them a thing. What the Daily News found in the 16-count complaint: continuous sexual abuse of three girls and one boy, all under 14, September 13, 2010 to April 15, 2011; nine counts of lewd act on a child; three of forcible lewd act, on one girl. He was on unpaid leave, the district said. In May prosecutors added nine more children, bail went to $3.4 million, and the district wrote itself a rule to tell parents within 72 hours of pulling a teacher from a classroom. Patch / City News Service.

August 20 and September 20, 2012

He was 51. In Los Angeles County Superior Court he pleaded no contest on August 20 to 13 counts of lewd act on a child, one for each of 13 children, seven girls and six boys, eight and nine years old, conduct September 2006 to April 2011. Fifteen other counts were dropped. On September 20 Judge Lloyd Nash sentenced him to 25 years in state prison and lifetime registration. No trial. The district had fired him in March. NBC Los Angeles.

June 11, 2014 to October 29, 2015

The two girls who filed first settled on the day their trial was set to start, June 11, 2014: $5 million between them. Three more former students settled in May 2015, $4.42 million. Then two boys took the district to trial, and this is the entry to read twice: L.A. Unified admitted liability for Chapel's conduct, so the jury in October 2015 was asked only what the boys were owed. The district's lawyer suggested just under $500,000 each. The jury took less than a day and gave them $3.1 million and $3,085,700, about $6.2 million together. One of the two had never been Chapel's student; he'd visited the classroom for candy. NBC Los Angeles.

May 18, 2016

Eighty-eight million dollars, the second-largest settlement in the district's history at the time, for 30 cases from two schools: $58 million for 18 De La Torre families over Robert Pimentel, $30 million for 12 Telfair families over Chapel. The families' lawyer said the settlements came from evidence the district had ignored warnings, employee reports and parent complaints. The superintendent's statement spoke of the policy changes made since. ABC7.

January 16, 2020

The Board of Education approved $25 million in settlements at one sitting, $18.4 million of it for nine children from the two elementary schools: $10 million to five more De La Torre students, $8.4 million to four more Telfair students. Their lawyer said the district had known about complaints against both teachers and kept them in the classroom. That is his characterisation of what was pleaded; the district settled and admitted nothing in these cases. CBS Los Angeles.

May 18, 2020

Judge Samantha Jessner approved $2.1 million for a 17-year-old, in the papers only as Jane RH Doe, who was eight and in his classroom in the 2010-11 school year. A minor's settlement needs a judge's signature, which is why this one is dated. The district had paid $2.1 million each the previous July to two more former students. That is the last Telfair settlement we have read. Nothing naming Telfair or Chapel has been filed in the six years since that we have found; if that changes, this page changes. MyNewsLA / City News Service.

We checked this on September 15, 2026, and the newest thing in it is from May 18, 2020. When something new gets filed or decided, it goes in here within 72 hours, with the link.

Who can be held responsible in a Telfair Elementary lawsuit

The district. Not the school, which isn't a thing you can sue on its own, and not only the teacher. Chapel answered for himself in a San Fernando courtroom in 2012, and he isn't who paid the settlements. The Los Angeles Unified School District paid them: the public body that hired him, sent him to an office when he was arrested in 1997, and put him back in a third-grade classroom in Pacoima in 1998. That's the theory of every Telfair case. A teacher answers for what he did. A district that knew what it knew and did that anyway answers for the children he reached afterward. L.A. Unified has paid on that theory at least seven times over this one man, and in October 2015 it stood in front of a jury and conceded it.

L.A. Unified is a public entity, and that changes two things a lawyer will walk you through. You don't file a government claim with the district first, whatever year it was; a childhood claim goes straight to court. And there's no cap in California on what a jury can award for what was actually done to a child at a public school. What the district can argue about is what it knew and when, and on this name that argument went badly enough for it that it stopped making it.

So this page is one school. The district's page is where the rest lives: five schools, hundreds of claims, the April 30, 2026 settlement, the $750 million in bonds, at /lausd-survivors. If your years at an L.A. Unified school were somewhere other than Telfair Avenue, that's your page. If they were at Telfair, start here. Same questions, same survivors on the phone.

Your deadline: the California statute of limitations for childhood sexual abuse at a public elementary 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 the reason we ask whether you were born in 1987 or later. If you were, the door is open on age alone. Do the arithmetic on a third-grader in his room in his first Telfair year, 1998-99: born around 1990. Everyone he taught there, first class to last, is inside on age, and the youngest of them, the 2010-11 class, have until the early 2040s.

Because LAUSD is a public entity there is one more rule, and here it helps. You do not file a government claim 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 no longer matters which year it was. Born before 1987, which for Telfair almost certainly means you were there before he was, the road runs through the discovery rule plus a showing that the district knew or should have known, and a lawyer has to look at those facts before anyone promises anything. We won't. For completeness: conduct on or after January 1, 2024 has no deadline at all, under section 340.1.

Put plainly, then. October 1998 to April 2011, anywhere in that building: you almost certainly still have time, and you'll have it for years. What doesn't keep is the rest of it. Who else was in the room. Which parent went to the office. Who the detectives talked to in 2011. That is the part worth one call now.

Your situation still qualifies even if

You never told a soul. About 22 kids talked to detectives in 2011, and you weren't one of them, which for an eight-year-old was a perfectly reasonable thing to be.
You weren't in his class. One of the two boys the jury heard from in 2015 wasn't either. He went to the room for candy. That's in the record on this page.
It never went as far as what was in the charges, and you figure that means it doesn't count.
Detectives interviewed your family in 2011, and then, nothing. A detective's interview isn't a claim. Nobody filed anything for you.
You think the families who settled got everyone's share. No. They got theirs, and look at the record: five different years the district paid on this school, 2014 to 2020, and it was new people coming forward that did it every time.
You live somewhere else now. Half of Pacoima's class of whatever-year does.

Schools covered

One school. Kindergarten through fifth, about 534 kids these days, an L.A. Unified school then and now, at 10975 Telfair Avenue, Pacoima, California 91331. Telfair Avenue Elementary. The classrooms, the yard, the after-school programs, a field trip, anything that ran under Telfair's name. October 1998 to April 2011 for the teacher in the record; any year for anyone else. A different L.A. Unified school, Miramonte, De La Torre, Portola, anywhere from the Harbor to the north Valley? The district has its own page, /lausd-survivors, with the record from five schools; it's the same defendant and the same questions. Answer them and say where.

Questions people are asking

He's already in prison. What else is there?

Criminal court decided what happens to him. Civil court decides what a school district owes the children it put in his classroom, and those are different questions with different answers. Nothing in his 25 years was for you.

Can I sue LAUSD over what happened at Telfair Elementary?

At least two dozen families have, and L.A. Unified settled with all of them but two, and those two it let a jury decide, after conceding it was responsible. Whether you can comes down mostly to when you were born, which is what the questions above sort out, and if you were born in 1987 or later the honest answer is yes, very likely. Born earlier, a lawyer has to look at the discovery rule and what the district knew.

Was Paul Chapel convicted?

He was, by plea. No contest on August 20, 2012, in Los Angeles County Superior Court, to 13 counts of lewd act on a child, involving 13 children, seven girls and six boys, aged eight and nine, between September 2006 and April 2011. Twenty-five years in state prison and lifetime registration, on September 20. The record above has the entry. The 13 counts were the ones prosecutors chose to take a plea on; 15 more were dropped. They were never meant to be a count of everyone.

Did the district know about Paul Chapel before he was arrested?

The families say it did, and the record above lays out why. A 1987 civil case at his previous school, which he lost. A 1997 prosecution that ended in a hung jury, during which the district took him out of a classroom, and after which it put him back in one, at Telfair, in October 1998. All of that is allegation, the 2012 complaint's. Here's what isn't: the one Telfair case that got as far as a trial, in 2015, and L.A. Unified admitting it was liable, so all that was left to argue over was the amount.

What would a sexual abuse lawyer cost me?

Here, nothing. Every case is on contingency. 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.