For the second time in less than two weeks, Santa Ana Unified School District disclosed a sexual assault settlement years after the incident, this time confirming a $950,000 payout in 2019 to a former student who had a sexual relationship with a basketball coach while she was in high school.
The former student said in a lawsuit that former Segerstrom High School assistant basketball coach Tracey Stephen Fulford sexually abused, harassed and molested her between the fall of 2014, when she was 16, until June 2017, a year after she graduated.
Fulford, 54, died on Aug. 20, 2018. During an arraignment in early 2018, he pleaded not guilty to two felony charges. The criminal case against him was dismissed after his death.
But a civil lawsuit against Fulford, Segerstrom High and the Santa Ana Unified School District remained pending. It was resolved, without any public announcement, a year after Fulford’s death, and disclosed to the Register on Feb. 25 following a request under the state’s Public Records Act.
Another case came to light in late February, when Santa Ana Unified confirmed that it settled a lawsuit involving a former walk-on baseball coach accused of sexually abusing and harassing boys from 2013 to 2015. The district paid $2.175 million to the families of six former students in October after reaching an agreement in April 2020, also without any kind of public announcement.
In that case, the former coach, Carlos Salcido Sales Jr., pleaded guilty in 2018 to sexually abusing 10 boys at Segerstrom High. (His middle name was listed as “Salcito” in school and court documents.) Sales was sentenced to two years in prison. He served one year and one day behind bars. After his release, he got a job at a warehouse and observed all the rules of his parole, including wearing an ankle monitor, according to an uncle, Ralph Salcido.
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In January, Sales contracted COVID-19. He died on Jan. 25, his uncle said. He was 30.
Sales understood that he “messed up” at Segerstrom High, his uncle said. “He paid his dues and he was very remorseful.”
Both settlements stipulate that the district does not acknowledge “admission of liability.”
School district officials declined to discuss either settlement and said they follow various legally mandated protocols to ensure that staff, volunteers and other adults on campus are screened and trained to prevent sexual abuse.
Neither final settlement appears to have gone before the School Board, which approves settlements below $50,000 that are paid directly from the district’s budget.
In a statement issued by Santa Ana Unified’s attorneys this week, officials said that claims are investigated, negotiated, settled or defended by the district’s insurance administrator. The district’s insurance carrier is the Alliance of Schools for Cooperative Insurance Programs, which is a joint powers authority governed by an executive committee of 13 school district and community college administrators.
“Once the school district has tendered the claim to our insurance carrier, the insurance administrator decides whether the matter should be settled,” the Santa Ana Unified statement reads.
In the Fulford case, Santa Ana police arrested him in July 2017 on suspicion of having sex with a student-athlete on and off campus. Their relationship continued after she turned 18, when police said it became a consensual, off-campus relationship.
The former student said she realized “that her molestation, harassment and sexual abuse by Fulford was wrong” when he “began plotting his sexual abuse” of her younger sister, according to her lawsuit. She reported her relationship with Fulford to police so “that her little sister would not become a victim of Fulford, too,” the lawsuit states.
But before going to police, the woman said she went to Segerstrom’s former head basketball coach, Jeff Watts. According to the lawsuit, Watts attempted to dissuade her from reporting it to authorities.
“Maybe when you come back (from vacation), you might not even want to do anything and you will probably get over it and you and Fulford would be back to being friends,” Watts allegedly told the woman, according to the lawsuit.
Watts, now an assistant girls basketball coach at Foothill High School in the Tustin Unified School District, did not reply this week to questions regarding the allegations in the lawsuit.
In an earlier interview, Watts said that he tried to halt the affair. The student, he said, first told a junior varsity coach what happened and that coach relayed it to Watts, who then met with the junior varsity coach and the student. “I listened to what she said,” Watts said.
Soon after, Watts was suspended by Santa Ana Unified for a year, he said, because he disclosed the situation to administrators on a Monday after learning about it on a Friday evening. He fought his suspension in court, a move he later said led to his dismissal from the district.
In court documents, Santa Ana Unified attorneys argued that the relationship between Fulford and the student athlete, who also worked as a volunteer coach in the year after graduation, became consensual once she turned 18 and that she could not claim sexual harassment or abuse at that point. The attorneys also termed another allegation in the lawsuit – that district officials should have known about the relationship while the victim was in school – as “vague conclusions and not supported by any facts.”
Attorney Vince Finaldi, of Manly, Stewart & Finaldi in Irvine, said the Fulford situation is “another example of a case that would not have happened had Fulford been appropriately been vetted, trained and supervised” by Santa Ana Unified.
“Until these school districts start supervising their teachers, and coaches, making sure they follow appropriate polices and procedures, this abuse is going to continue,” said Finaldi, whose law firm also represented the families of the boys in the Sales’ case settlement.
Staff writers Sean Emery and Steve Fryer contributed to this report.
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