WESLACO — Leadership at Weslaco ISD largely failed to answer questions raised by police records related to the arrest of a former employee who allegedly slapped a special education student at Mary Hoge Middle School in December.
A timeline of events that day appears to indicate the student’s parent or guardian was not notified about the incident for at least 18 hours, and there have also been claims that the employee involved has mental health struggles.
A video of that incident was met with shock and disgust when it circulated social and traditional media in December.
The woman who allegedly slapped the child, 73-year-old Magdalena Sustaita, was arrested on Jan. 24 and charged with injury to a child. She was released on a $2,500 bond the same day.
In the video a woman can be seen approaching a boy who’s being lightly held down by the shoulders by other students. The woman quickly rips his face mask off and sharply smacks him across the left cheek.
The woman walks off and other students giggle. One shouts “This is not your house” at the boy before the students put his mask back on, first over his eyes, then over his mouth.
According to the district, that employee was immediately terminated after an internal investigation.
Weslaco police documents released to The Monitor last week describe the police investigation into the incident that led to Sustaita’s arrest.
According to those documents, Principal Vallejo contacted the school’s police resource officer around 3:15 p.m. on Dec. 2 and told him about the incident, which occurred a little before 1 p.m. the previous day.
Vallejo described the incident to the officer and showed him a video of it taken by another student, records show. They also say Vallejo told the officer that Sustaita was no longer employed with the district, that another staff member was present during the incident and that the child’s mother had been informed.
A detective reviewed that slapping video the next day and met with an individual about it.
Redactions obscure the identity of that individual, although they appear to have been a parent or guardian of the child.
The documents say that individual received a call from Vallejo telling them about the alleged slapping at about 11:47 a.m. the day after the incident.
The individual told the detective they went to Vallejo’s office, who said he hadn’t told the individual about the incident sooner “due to getting the report late” the afternoon of the previous day.
That individual told police they were “enraged” and that they “deserved to know sooner than that.”
The records appear to describe that individual pulling the child out of school that day and wanting to file charges on the boy’s behalf.
That detective met with another individual the next day who appeared to be that other employee present when the incident happened, according to the documents. They told law enforcement they hadn’t noticed the incident and that Sustaita had been a good aide for the most part and that there hadn’t been any problems during their classes.
The child was interviewed at a Child Advocacy Center later that month, the documents show, but the boy is largely non-verbal and the interview did not seem to go well.
Information in the documents indicates Sustaita may not have been fit to be in the classroom in the first place.
The documents say police received a retention form from Attorney Daniel Sorrells on Dec. 19., who wrote that “Sustaita is not in her right mind and therefore cannot be interviewed or interrogated.”
Sorrells provided police with medical records from an evaluation performed three days after the alleged slap in which Dr. Leonel Cantu indicated Sustaita displayed signs of dementia and mental illness, the criminal complaint stated.
“I asked to speak with Sorrells for further information, but I would have to subpoena Sustaita’s records to see if she actually has a history of mental illness,” the detective wrote.
That subpoena yielded no fruit.
The detective obtained it on Jan. 6 and went to Dr. Cantu’s office for Sustaita’s medical records, but the office told him they weren’t ready and that they would reach out when the records were available.
The detective returned on Jan. 18 and was told the office had forgotten to prepare the records and that they were still not ready, the complaint stated.
“The lady upfront was not very helpful, and I told her of the importance of the records,” the detective wrote.
Other school employees had told the detective that they’d had no real concerns with Sustaita and had trusted her to take care of the children, although one indicated she’d overheard talk of Sustaita forgetting minor things, according to the documents.
The detective subsequently requested a warrant for Sustaita’s arrest.
BOARD RESPONSE
District leadership largely failed to answer any questions from The Monitor based on those documents last week.
Interim Superintendent Criselda “Cris” Valdez and Board President Armando Cuellar both ignored repeated attempts to contact them, directly and through intermediaries.
The Monitor emailed questions about that incident to a district spokesperson Friday asking them to clarify the timeline of how the incident was reported, whether the other employee in the classroom was reprimanded in any way and whether the district was aware that Sustaita may have been suffering from dementia and mental illness.
That email went unanswered as of Saturday.
For the most part, trustees contacted by The Monitor about the incident said Cuellar and Valdez were their official spokespeople.
Two trustees did respond to questions about the incident.
Jesse Trevino, who previously called for a strong response to the incident, said Thursday he felt if the timeline portrayed by those police documents was accurate he would call for investigating the district’s response to the incident.
Trevino said if his child was involved in a similar incident he would want to be notified immediately.
“It would be completely unacceptable if the parents were not notified until the next day,” he said.
The documents indicate Vallejo reported the incident to the school’s police officer at 3:15 p.m. on Dec. 2. Trevino said he’d understood that law enforcement had been involved on Dec. 1, the day the incident happened.
“That’s not good to hear that there’s conflicting stories,” he said.
Trustee Isidoro Nieto also commented on the information in the documents. He largely declined to comment on specifics from the incident, but noted incident reporting has to travel through administrative channels and said he felt a 24-hour timeline would have been appropriate for contacting the student’s parents and for involving law enforcement.
“What I always tell people, within 24 hours, because you don’t know what has happened and you’ve got to investigate it,” he said.
Nieto said he wasn’t aware of another staff member being in the room and that he wasn’t aware Sustaita may have been mentally unfit and suffering from dementia.
