Robert and Theresa “Troy” Bowman, who now live in Colorado, seek unspecified damages in the death of their son, who collapsed on Aug. 13, 2007, and died a week later at Kalispell Regional Medical Center.
He was 17.
The lawsuit states that doctors at Kalispell Regional Medical Center concluded Bowman “suffered several injuries including cardiac arrest and a resulting anoxic brain injury.”
It also alleges that the first member of the football coaching staff to reach Bowman after he collapsed while running a lap “yelled at Jeffrey to get up and get going” while grabbing him by the shirt.
The second coach who arrived, the lawsuit alleges, “reached down, grabbed the inside of the waistline of Jeffrey's pants, lifted him off the ground, then dropped him onto the ground.”
Those coaches were not identified in the lawsuit.
“As Jeff fought for his life on the field, the coaches could have saved him with the school's defibrillator,” Robert and Troy Bowman said in a statement released by their attorney, Daniel J. Caplis of Denver. “But the coaches did not use it to save our son from what they had done to him.”
Missoula attorney Charles E. McNeil of Garlington, Lohn and Robinson, who is representing the Bigfork School District, said the lawsuit was expected and that “we still don't have any information on whether the cause of death was due to something the school district did or didn't do. We've requested that.”
“The district,” McNeil added, “doesn't believe anything it did or didn't do caused his death.”
The school district hired Missoula attorney Elizabeth A. Kaleva last fall to investigate the circumstances surrounding Bowman's death. She interviewed 37 people present at the practice.
Her report found that the district did not have an adequate system in place to monitor whether players had undergone the required physical examination before taking part in football practice. But it also found the response of the coaching staff was “adequate under the circumstances.”
Assistant coaches Siae Misa and Cy Murer, Kaleva said in her report, initially believed Bowman was suffering a seizure, and tried to pry the boy's jaw open to keep his tongue from blocking his airway. They also asked bystanders to call 9-1-1, according to the report.
When the parent of another player came over and told the coaches he did not believe it was a seizure, the assistants checked for pulse and breath, then began CPR and continued until emergency personnel arrived, the report said.
When it was released, Bowman's parents called the report “a biased, misleading and incomplete charade.”
Of the 37 people she interviewed, Kaleva said 14 did not witness or see enough of the incident to comment. Nineteen others said members of the coaching staff responded appropriately, most saying within 20 to 30 seconds of Bowman's collapsing.
Four others said it took up to three minutes. In her report, Kaleva labeled those four “not as credible” as the other 19.
“Bigfork High used a handpicked attorney to issue a so-called ‘independent report' to cover itself,” the Bowmans said in their statement released Wednesday. “But they won't be able to handpick which information goes to the jury.”
Jeff Bowman was the catalyst in his family's decision to move from the Denver area to Bigfork late in 2006, and his mother said she had never seen him so happy.
The teenager loved the outdoors - after moving to Montana he added fly-fishing to all the activities he enjoyed, from kayaking to rock climbing - and he was a voracious reader as well.
While his favorite authors were Kurt Vonnegut and Hunter S. Thompson, Bowman didn't limit himself. When his mother entered his bedroom the day after he collapsed on the football field, she found the 17-year-old had been reading a book by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
Moving to Bigfork midway through the first semester of his junior year of high school, Bowman took night classes to keep up with his core requirements, then enrolled at Bigfork High School for the second semester of the 2006-07 school year.
He was just days away from the start of his senior year when he died.
After a memorial service in Bigfork, Bowman's funeral was held in Colorado. He was buried the next day in Estes Park, on Sept. 7, on what would have been his 18th birthday.
“We have spent the last year working to cut through the lies and expose the truth about what happened to our son,” the Bowmans said in their statement. “We know we can't bring Jeff back. Š But we can help make sure the truth is told, and that this never happens to any other child in Montana, or anywhere in America. That is why we are filing a lawsuit in Federal Court.”
They accused the school district of stonewalling them on public record requests, but said it “won't be able to stonewall a Federal Court judge.”
A big verdict in the case, the Bowmans added, will send a loud and clear message to schools that they cannot allow players to participate in athletics without having the proper medical forms on file, and that they cannot conduct practices in unsafe conditions.
The lawsuit accuses the school district of wrongful conduct, including “the providing of false information to the public and the withholding of information from the public in an attempt to conceal the fault of the defendants and shift blame to the victims.”
It asks that Robert and Troy Bowman be compensated for the present value of Jeff's reasonable earnings during his life expectancy, medical expenses, pain and suffering experienced by Jeff from the time he collapsed until his death a week later, funeral and burial expenses, medical expenses, loss of consortium, loss of care and comfort, emotional distress, mental anguish, loss of future support, loss of earnings, reduced earning capacity and other special damages.
“We know that some will think we want to profit from our son's death,” the Bowmans said. “That is the furthest thing from the truth. We would give up all we have just to spend another moment with Jeff. But we are willing to put up with some people thinking bad things about us if it will help protect other kids.”
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