Long-buried report concluded Chicago school principal ignored warnings in horrific sexual abuse case
Marvin Lovett was a trusted mentor to students at Johnson Elementary School. He also was a pedophile. Lovett used a camera hidden in his apartment closet to make secret pornographic videotapes of students, police and school reports show. He plied boys with cash and gym shoes as he destroyed their childhoods. Shot to death in April 2000 by a teenage student he abused for five years — since the boy was 12 — Lovett has been accused in lawsuits of sexually abusing at least 19 boys in the North Lawndale community.
It is the largest known case of sexual abuse involving a Chicago Public Schools worker, volunteer or vendor in recent decades, one that led to $2.7 million in legal settlements earlier this year. Yet no one at CPS was ever held accountable for allowing a dangerous sexual predator to volunteer and work in the West Side school. Now a Tribune investigation has uncovered a 58-page case manager’s report from the CPS inspector general’s office in which four CPS employees told investigators they had raised concerns with the school’s principal, Mattie Tyson, about Lovett’s interactions with boys.
“Tyson knew or should have known that Lovett was either an active pedophile or posed a risk to the students at Johnson School,” that 2002 investigative report concludes. It also concludes that she “had reasonable cause to believe that children known to her in her professional or official capacity may have been abused” and that her failure to inform child welfare officials was a violation of state law and CPS policy. The potentially explosive findings have been hidden from public view for 16 years in large part because the inspector general who reviewed the report rejected its conclusions and closed the case as “unsubstantiated.” Tyson, who adamantly denied to investigators and to the Tribune that she knew Lovett had abused children, was not disciplined and retired in 2004.
For more than two months, CPS denied Tribune requests for any records about the Lovett case. Reporters found a copy of the investigative report in a court filing from one of the lawsuits filed by Lovett’s alleged victims. It was attached as an exhibit to a motion submitted in that suit. Then on Friday, after the Tribune told CPS it was preparing to publish a story, district officials released a copy of the report with many names blacked out, as well as hundreds of pages of related records. The Lovett case has fresh significance as CPS works to implement reforms in response to the Tribune’s ongoing “Betrayed” investigation, which revealed systemic failures of child protection and showed police had investigated 523 cases of sexual violence against students inside Chicago public schools since 2008.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/watchdog/ct-met-school-sex-abuse-lovett-20180625-story.html#