Leiria school principal where student killed by falling gate won’t face trial

The headmaster of a school in Leiria, accused along with a teacher of manslaughter for the death of a pupil when a gate fell, will not stand trial, a criminal investigation judge has decided.

“(…) I decide not to prosecute the accused (…) for the negligent homicide attributed to her or for any other crime, ordering in this regard that the file be archived promptly,” reads the ruling of the investigation, according to which the materials are sent to the local criminal court of Leiria for sentencing of the teacher.

In March, the Public Prosecutor’s Office (MP) charged the administrative director and teacher of the Colégio Conciliar de Maria Imaculada with negligent homicide, arguing, among other things, that the organization was responsible for the sports equipment and therefore had a duty to ensure that safety requirements were met when using the beacons.

At the investigation stage, the accused briefly stated that she had not committed a crime and had not breached any duty of care, as well as the fact that the target did not belong to an educational institution.

In a non-judgment order dated the 6th and to which Lusa now has access, “the Court considers it inadmissible that the teenager died during the activity” due to “the use of sports equipment without the necessary safety conditions.”

“It is similarly incomprehensible (and unacceptable) that the risk of this event was multiplied by an unspecified but clearly significant number of such uses, at least in the 2020/2021 academic year,” up until the student’s death, the investigation writes.

And if “this is from the realm of the general and abstract,” then speaking specifically, “the question is whether the investigation has collected enough evidence” to substantiate the charges against the director. However, there is no indication that she “knew that the targets in question were used in physical education classes without the use of stabilizing devices.”

“This knowledge would only be required if it were communicated to people who, according to the internal regulations of the discipline and institutions, [de educação física]”The primary responsibility was to ensure the safe use of such equipment,” the order said.

The incident occurred on May 25, 2021, during a 9th-grade physical education lesson held on the educational institution’s football field with artificial turf.

In the facts that have been sufficiently indicated (considering only those that relate to the principal), we read that in a lesson that began at 15:45, the physical education teacher “divided the students in the class into six groups,” two of which were handball groups.

“The space where the handball lessons took place was divided into two parts, in each of them and on the upper lines handball goals were installed, which allowed each group in the part of the space they occupied to carry out actions near the corresponding goal,” he explains.

At 4:50 p.m., one of the groups was “playing handball near one of these goals,” with “one of the students taking up a position near the goal instead of the goalkeeper, and three others passing the ball between themselves so that they could shoot until they scored.”

“It was at this point, because they had just scored a goal, that they changed goalkeepers,” the student who took over the goal described in the document, explaining that after the change, the victim “ran towards the goal” and “was hanging on the top post.”

The student was immediately “thrown forward along with the target, fell face down on the ground, and the target fell on top of him, hitting him in the head area.” He would eventually die at 5:44 p.m. in Leiria Hospital.

“The target was not secured to the ground and there was no counterweight attached to it to prevent it from falling or moving,” he adds.

In the decision, the judge points out that the instruction decides not “what the investigation could and/or should have been, but what it was,” not “what the charge should have been, but what the conclusion was,” and makes it clear that the investigation was “significantly short of what would have been optimal or even satisfactory.”

In this regard, it is noted that the first “investigative actions” of the Public Security Police (PSP) took place only on December 13, 2021. A week later, the PSP prepared a final report in which “nothing was done.”

In January 2022, the deputy determined that he would “request information about the composition of the group” from the victim and only a year later that “the PSP will go to the scene of the events to investigate the installation of the beacon security mechanisms.” – says the judicial judge, also pointing out that the witnesses, with the exception of one, “were heard almost two years after the facts.”

“The investigation, which was slow to start, was also slow to end,” he notes, specifying that the PSP “submitted a second final report with a proposed indictment on May 19, 2023,” but it was filed 10 months later. “Without that. It’s been a very long time since we’ve done anything more than just get some documentation.”

According to the investigating judge, “this unclear procedure (or lack thereof) probably explains why, at this point, more than three years after the facts, some issues have not been properly clarified, which significantly weakens the prosecution.”