Bus driver who molested girl was caught hiding peeping arrest. Lucia Mar hired him anyway
A Lucia Mar Unified School District bus driver who molested a special needs student in 2017 should never have been hired after he was caught omitting a misdemeanor peeping conviction on his job application in 2012.
But for reasons unknown, David Lamb was allowed to submit another application and was hired, putting him in a place of authority he used to molest the 9-year-old girl on his bus route five years later, according to records the district released in response to a lawsuit from the girl’s family.
The second application four months after the first again misrepresented the conviction, but was accepted by the district, records show.
The records also show that two educators suspected a second student may have been victimized, but it’s unclear how the district responded, if at all, to those reports.
The educators at a South County elementary school wrote letters to a district official reporting that a second special education student from Lamb’s route was showing possible signs of trauma. There’s no record of any additional charges related to another victim.
Lamb was convicted in 2018 of two counts of committing lewd acts against a child and sentenced to 16 years in state prison.
Attorney David Ring of Taylor & Ring in Los Angeles, who is representing the victim in the lawsuit against Lucia Mar with Santa Maria attorney Robert May of The May Firm, said the school district for three years failed to hand over a rejection letter that showed Lamb should never have been hired.
“The school district went out of its way to conceal that Lamb was disqualified from ever being a bus driver for lying on his application about his criminal history,” he said. “The school district hid it, concealed it, and prayed to God it would never come out.”
The records also show that Lamb told the victim’s attorney this year that a transportation supervisor told him to reapply for the job, and the district appears to have never followed up on his background check.
It was only after Lamb reluctantly revealed details in a jailhouse interview in March that the district released that letter to the attorneys.
“That letter should have been the first thing provided to us,” Ring said.
The district’s attorneys, however, said in an email that the letter was simply “missed” early in the discovery process in 2018.
In response to repeated requests for an interview with district officials about Lamb’s hiring last week, a spokeswoman told The Tribune on Tuesday that the district would not be answering questions about the case.
Instead, it issued this statement: “The district complies with all applicable laws concerning the vetting and hiring of job applicants, including bus drivers. It cooperated with law enforcement throughout their investigation into these matters, which led to the arrest of Mr. Lamb in June of 2017. The investigation concluded approximately four years ago.”
District ‘didn’t believe’ reports of abuse, detective said
After the victim’s family reported him to the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff’s Office, Lamb was arrested following a search of his Arroyo Grande home.
He initially faced four felony charges for lewd acts with a child under 14 (two of which allege force), two felony charges of sexual penetration of a victim 10 years old or younger, and one felony charge of sending or sharing harmful material with intent to seduce a minor.
The criminal case never went to trial and the victim — whom The Tribune is not identifying — never had to testify after Lamb pleaded no contest to the two charges in exchange for a 16-year prison sentence.
Had he taken the case to trial, Lamb, 52, faced the possibility of life in prison.
At the February 2018 preliminary hearing, Det. Devashish Menghrajani testified that Lamb had been the girl’s bus driver between January and June 2017, and she was often the only passenger on the bus with him for approximately 15 minutes each trip.
During that time, Menghrajani said the girl told officials that Lamb showed her pornography on his cell phone about 10 times, exposed himself to her, and touched her sexually “multiple times” on different occasions. Each incident occurred on the bus when the girl was alone with Lamb, he said.
It’s unclear from court testimony when the girl’s family first made a complaint to the district, but Menghrajani said a transportation supervisor reviewed some of the bus footage in conducting the district’s investigation.
“Her conclusion was there was nothing there ... based on the limited information she was looking at,” the detective said. “This lady’s not trained — they just looked at a few videos. They didn’t look at all the data.”
By the time the allegations were reported to the Sheriff’s Office, some of the bus’ surveillance footage from that five-month period had been automatically recorded over, he testified.
“They didn’t believe (the alleged victim),” Menghrajani said of the school district. “(The supervisor) assumed the victim wasn’t telling the truth.”
Victim’s family reported driver to district twice
In April 2018, the victim’s family filed the lawsuit against Lamb and the school district, alleging that the girl’s guardians twice confronted district officials about the girl’s accusations against Lamb.
The second time, the unnamed transportation manager allegedly told the family she reviewed the bus surveillance footage and found no inappropriate behavior before returning Lamb to work.
“Given the security footage mentioned above, this leaves only two possibilities: 1) The supervisor did not bother to fully review the tapes available to her,” the lawsuit reads, “or 2) the supervisor reviewed the disturbing footage and chose to keep it from plaintiff’s parents, as well as not report it to law enforcement, to protect LMUSD and Lamb from scrutiny and bad publicity.”
Once the family reported Lamb to the Sheriff’s Office, he was arrested within a week.
Ring says that district staff failed at their mandatory duty to report suspected child abuse.
The family is seeking an unspecified amount in damages — likely in the millions — for the girls’ lasting emotional trauma, to be determined by a jury, Ring said.
“She’s been through a tremendous amount of therapy and still has a vivid memory of what Lamb did to her,” Ring said. “She still struggles with it.”
The case is scheduled for trial in September.
Why was David Lamb hired?
The district in 2018 provided records to the attorneys that show Lamb applied as a bus driver with the district on Jan. 10, 2012. When asked whether he was ever convicted of a felony or a misdemeanor, Lamb checked “No.”
“Not hiring — falsified app,” is handwritten on the application.
According to the newly released rejection letter provided to the attorneys, on Jan. 23, 2012, the district’s assistant superintendent of human resources, Michelle Ellis, wrote to Lamb that a background check revealed that he failed to report a conviction from 1998.
Because it’s “the expressed practice of the Lucia Mar Unified School District to deny employment to any individual who makes a false statement or affirmation” on an employment application, the district wrote to Lamb it was “unable to employ you effective this date.”
But a second application dated April 16, 2012, showed that Lamb in his second attempt to be hired inaccurately disclosed his conviction as “misdemeanor trespassing/loitering.”
He was hired two days later.
A U.S. Department of Justice report date-stamped May 11, 2017, turned over by the district, shows Lamb was convicted of misdemeanor disorderly conduct for peeking into an inhabited building in 1998.
Another record that appears to be notes taken by an unspecified administrator after Lamb’s arrest shows that the district had “no records on whether reference checks were done.”
“This was under Assistant Superintendent Ellis’ watch,” the notes read, naming other staff members whose roles were being shuffled at the time. “Much going on in HR at this time. I can explain if necessary how this might have impacted ‘no reference’ check.”
According to California’s education code, the misdemeanor peeping conviction by itself would not have legally precluded Lamb from employment with the district, since it did not require registration as a sex offender.
The records also include two letters from a former principal and a former instructional assistant at Grover Heights Elementary to former assistant human resources director Charles Fiorentino in June 2017 reporting that another special education student — whose identity is redacted but is clearly not the victim in the criminal case — was also showing possible symptoms of trauma after Lamb drove her on his afternoon route.
The letters said the girl had shown a noted increase in banging her head, inappropriate behavior, and crying when she needed to get on her afternoon bus.
The educators reported the issue to Fiorentino in the child’s best interest, given Lamb’s arrest. Records provided in the case don’t show where those went. One of those letter writers declined to comment to The Tribune; the second did not respond to requests for comment.
It is not clear whether those reports were investigated.
“Every step of the way, Lucia Mar either engaged in gross negligence, intentional cover-ups, or just flat-out lies in order to protect the school district’s reputation as opposed to taking steps to protect these kids on the special needs bus,” Ring said.
Lamb says supervisor told him to reapply
During a Zoom deposition in March, Lamb told Ring from Chuckawalla Valley State Prison in Blythe that he had been convicted of misdemeanor trespassing in 1986.
In response to a question from Ring, Lamb said prosecutors initially “tried to get” him with a peeping charge, according to a transcript of the deposition provided by the attorneys in the case.
Then Ring asked about a 1997 arrest after Lamb was standing on a sidewalk, looking into a residence’s window.
“But isn’t the truth of that one, again, you were looking in someone’s window as they were undressing? And you got arrested and convicted for being a peeping tom. Isn’t that true?” Ring asked.
Lamb initially wouldn’t answer the question, but when pressed by Ring he eventually admitted to watching a person undress, but claimed the conviction was for “voyeurism,” before saying it was loitering.
Lamb said that during his time as a bus driver, he also spent a few years as the driver’s union representative and would handle employee grievances and represent employees in disciplinary issues.
When Ring questioned Lamb about his falsified January 2012 application, Lamb denied he lied but called his response “an omission of a mistake due to the fact I thought it was a sealed record,” according to the transcript.
Lamb later admitted he “failed to answer it correctly.”
He said he was interviewed and eventually hired for the job by his direct supervisor, Sharon Harwin.
Lamb recalled of his first interview with Harwin: “ ... She said something along the lines of it came back denied because you have a misdemeanor. And I said, ‘What?’ And she goes, ‘About an arrest in 1996 or ‘97.’ I said, like, ‘That was a trespassing/loitering thing. I didn’t think it went through.’ She says, ‘Well, you should just go ahead and remit everything and we’ll push it through. ‘And she said that this crime is not a crime that would prevent you from employment.”
“So Ms. Harwin ... encouraged you to reapply a second time, is that accurate?” Ring asked.
“She told me to just reapply. I don’t know if she encouraged me,” Lamb said. “She said, ‘If you want to reapply, you can.”
“But she also said, ‘Hey, we’ll push it through,’ that was your phrase you just used, ‘we’ll push it through’?”
“Yeah, ‘we’ll push it through up to HR and see what they say,’” Lamb responded.
But Lamb also said he told Harwin his conviction was for loitering, and though she asked for documentation, Lamb said he told Harwin he had lost the records in his move to San Luis Obispo County.
Lamb said there was never any follow-up with him about the matter.
Harwin, who still works for the district as its transportation coordinator, did not respond to requests for comment from The Tribune.
Lucia Mar has withheld records before
Lucia Mar has previously been taken to court over its withholding of records related to an employee accused of abusing students.
After allowing an accused Nipomo High School girls’ wrestling coach to resign with an agreement that the district wouldn’t reveal the molestation accusations against him to other potential employers in 2018, the district also refused to release hundreds of pages of public records in response to a Tribune investigation for nearly a year.
The district ultimately provided some of the materials — which showed district officials were slow to respond to accusations of inappropriate touching and harassment by coach Justin Magdaleno — a little more than a week after the newspaper sued the district in San Luis Obispo Superior Court.
The judge in the case rejected the district’s argument that the lawsuit was frivolous and ordered most of The Tribune’s requested records released. The court awarded the newspaper more than $80,000 in attorney fees.
All told, the district spent at least $386,000 to separate from Magdaleno and keep the case quiet.
That’s not including the $1.25 million the district will spend in a settlement with five of Magdaleno’s former student athletes, in a civil case brought by celebrity attorney Gloria Allred.
This story was originally published May 19, 2021 at 9:16 AM.
