Crime & Law
CPS Did Not Properly Vet Security Guard With Criminal History Who Later Was Charged With Sexually Assaulting Student, Lawsuit Alleges
Farragut Career Academy High School, 2345 S. Christiana Ave., is pictured in a file photo. (WTTW News)
A Chicago Public Schools student filed a lawsuit Tuesday accusing the district of failing to adequately vet a security guard with a litany of past criminal cases who was later arrested on multiple charges of sexually assaulting the student.
The lawsuit details sixteen arrests that preceded the hire of Romel Campoverde, 45, by the district. The complaint highlights cases in which police said Campoverde admitted to being a member of the Satan Disciple street gang before he was hired at Farragut Career Academy High School in Little Village.
While the arrest of Campoverde was widely covered at the time, a WTTW News investigation in 2023 was the first to report his criminal record, and how his criminal history was considered by CPS.
Campoverde was charged with multiple counts of sexual assault of a minor in 2023, records show. The criminal case is ongoing, and Campoverde has a status hearing Aug. 25. He continues to be on electronic monitoring.
The criminal case alleged Campoverde groomed the girl, who was 15 at the time, and bought her alcohol before assaulting her in a recreational vehicle.
In a 2023 interview, Campoverde’s former attorney said the criminal history had no bearing on the sexual assault case. Most of the cases were dismissed.
The civil case, which identifies the plaintiff as Jane Doe, seeks damages including for assault, battery and violating the Illinois Gender Violence Act.
The lawsuit, filed by the Lane Brown law firm, highlights a number of cases from the WTTW News story, including one where he was accused of chasing a man with a baseball bat and another where he was alleged to have punched a man in the face.
In a 2005 case, police said Campoverde attempted to rob a man for drugs with a BB gun.
He was charged with felony burglary for breaking into a man’s car in Bolingbrook in 2002. That charge was dismissed when he pled to trespassing.
The lawsuit accuses the district of failing to background Campoverde properly before his 2021 hire, and seeks more than $50,000 in damages. It alleges the plaintiff has suffered damages including medical and legal expenses, as well as severe emotional distress, fear, humiliation, anxiety and other medical conditions that require ongoing professional treatment.
During a news conference Wednesday, Mark Brown of Lane Brown read a statement from the victim.
“What Romel Campoverde did to me changed everything. I used to be a happy, outgoing teenager. I loved school. I trusted adults,” the statement read. “After the attack, I couldn’t go back to my school.”
The girl missed a whole year following the attack, and transferred to another school.
Chicago Public Schools did not respond to a request for comment, saying the civil case remains active and litigation is ongoing.
Brown said the district’s policy requires them to do more in its backgrounding process.
“Their policies do look back seven years, but when there’s a pattern of arrests over a long period of time, especially that show violent behavior, their own policies require them to look into and look further into the underlying facts of those crimes that go beyond seven years,” Brown said.
“The background process that they did utilize, they had the full 20 year arrest record showing 16 plus arrests,” Brown said. “They just failed to take any action further than that to look into the underlying facts.”
Brown said it took his law firm about a week to obtain Campoverde’s arrest reports using the Freedom of Information Act.
“CPS failed to do a comprehensive background check on this security guard and hired him to protect students, teachers and other people at Farragut Academy,” Brown said. “By not doing a comprehensive background check, they failed all of those people, and he raped a 15-year-old student.”
Records say Campoverde took the girl to his home following prom. She said the two were drinking alcohol, and Campoverde instructed her to use Signal, a private messaging app, to communicate with him in the future, according to police records. She had been communicating with Campoverde via SnapChat, records show, which also would have been against district policy.
Campoverde bought the girl alcoholic beverages on the night of the alleged assault, which caused her to have “blackouts,” according to records.
Police found two of her broken press-on nails by the bed in his recreational vehicle following the assault, which happened a month after prom, the police report said. Records show she said she bought the nails with money given to her by Campoverde.
Since 2022, records show the district has paid more than $6.1 million in cases involving allegations of employee-on-student sexual misconduct.
Contact Jared Rutecki: @JaredRutecki | [email protected]
