Mom Sues School District After Nonverbal Son with Autism, 7, Climbs Out of Window, Walks to Busy Road

YOU NEED TO KNOW

• A Kentucky mother is suing her son’s school district, claiming his teachers left the window open and he crawled out of it

• Leslie Weston’s autistic son was found on a busy road by animal control officers after multiple motorists called police.

• “We do not make statements regarding pending litigation,” Fayette County Public Schools told PEOPLE.

A Kentucky mother is suing the local school district for negligence after her autistic son left class and fell onto a busy road “completely unnoticed” by school officials.

“It was the worst day of my life,” Leslie Weston said. LEX18 On a recent November day, her seven-year-old son, who is autistic and predominantly nonverbal, climbed out of his classroom window at Meadowthorpe Elementary School and found himself in the middle of one of Lexington’s busiest roads.

Her son is in the school’s moderate-to-severe disability, or MSD, class, where he has a “well-documented and known obsession” with the window, according to a lawsuit reviewed by PEOPLE that Weston filed against the district. However, the lawsuit alleges that on Nov. 17, the window was not locked, but instead “the window in the MSD classroom was left open and unattended.”

“We do not make statements regarding pending litigation,” Fayette County Public Schools told PEOPLE.

That’s when his son “MSD went completely unnoticed by any of the adults in his class, [and] He climbed out the open window and exited the building, according to the lawsuit.

According to the complaint, the boy ran across the school grounds, visible on security cameras, and then began climbing onto a nearby busy road through a hole in the fence. Many drivers called the police and reported that the stray child was running on the side of the road.

Eventually, officers from animal control were able to take the boy to the hospital, where he became terrified, had an elevated heart rate, and vomited. No children had been reported missing at this point, but as the lawsuit alleges, hospital staff noticed her “chewing the ‘Recess’ tag and decided to call nearby Meadowthorpe Elementary School to see if a student was missing.”

The complaint alleges that “Child Protective Services (“CPS”) conducted an investigation, based on which findings of abandonment, supervisory neglect, and threatened physical abuse were substantiated.”

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Weston claims her son “suffered serious and permanent injuries and damage” and told LEX18: “My mind went to the worst because that’s my biggest fear and I’m always like, ‘What if this happens?’ I thought. “Or you see the news and you say, ‘I hope this never happens to my son,’ and then it does.”

“All my worst fears came true.”

Read the original article People