Fort Worth teachers used illegal restraint before student’s death, police report shows
Months after the death of a student at a Fort Worth school last year, district officials said staff members followed their training when they physically restrained the student.
But newly released documents show that wasn’t the case. A report from the Fort Worth Police Department obtained by the Star-Telegram through an open records request shows that Fort Worth Independent School District staff members restrained Xavier Hernandez, 21, face-down on the floor after Hernandez tried to leave the classroom.
The training program the district uses to teach school staff members how to restrain students safely doesn’t include face-down restraints, which experts say are dangerous because they can leave the person being restrained unable to breathe. That method of restraint is also illegal in most cases in Texas. But a former staff member at the school who was involved in the restraint said staff members there used prone restraints to subdue Hernandez at least two or three times a week.
Hernandez died March 1, 2021, at John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth. Hernandez, who had autism and schizophrenia, was a student at Boulevard Heights, a Fort Worth school for students with disabilities. The Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office ruled last year that Hernandez died of the combined effects of physical restraint and chlorpromazine, an antipsychotic medication that’s sometimes used as a sedative for aggressive behaviors in children and teenagers.
A Fort Worth police report shows Hernandez’s teacher, Brad Webb, and a teacher’s assistant, Toras Hill, told officers they took Hernandez to the floor and restrained him on his stomach after he tried to run out of the classroom. Hill told officers that teachers held Hernandez’s arms to the floor because he sometimes tried to harm himself by biting his hands. During the restraint, Hill and Webb noticed that Hernandez’s breathing was slowing. When they heard him making a gurgling sound, they turned him onto his side and noticed his lips had turned blue, according to the report.
Homicide detectives from the Fort Worth Police Department investigated Hernandez’s death but didn’t make an arrest. The state ban on prone and supine restraints — maneuvers that place the student lying either face-down or face-up on the floor — is a part of the Texas Education Code, which is enforced not by local police, but by the Texas Education Agency. A TEA spokesman said Friday that the agency is investigating the matter. Webb still works for the Fort Worth district, but Hill does not, a district spokeswoman said.
Face-down holds are unapproved under district’s training program
The district uses training from the Milwaukee-based firm Crisis Prevention Institute to teach school staff to restrain students safely. In August 2021, three months after Hernandez’s death, then-district spokesman Clint Bond told the Star-Telegram that staff members had followed that training when they restrained Hernandez.
But a former Crisis Prevention Institute trainer who reviewed the police report at the Star-Telegram’s request said the restraint technique that Hill and Webb told police they used didn’t comply with the institute’s training protocol. Charnequa Austin Kennedy, now the director of the Counseling Center at North Carolina Central University, previously worked as a trainer in the Williamson County school district in suburban Nashville, as well as at a nonprofit in South Carolina. The institute’s training doesn’t include restraint holds that would place a student on the floor either face-up or face-down, she said.
The president of the firm told the Star-Telegram last year that the institute’s training focuses primarily on de-escalation, teaching school staff members to head off volatile situations before a restraint is required. The institute doesn’t train teachers to restrain students by taking them to the floor, she said.
In an email, Fort Worth ISD officials said all district employees were advised in September of this year that prone and supine restraints are prohibited. Following Hernandez’s death, the district standardized all its restraint training under Crisis Prevention Institute. Previously, the district had used training from the institute as well as one other provider.
In February of this year, the district also introduced training from Ukeru Systems as an alternative to physical restraint, district officials said in an email. Ukeru is a training program that teaches school staff and healthcare workers to manage crisis situations without physically restraining students or patients. Instead of restraint maneuvers, the training program makes use of blocking pads to prevent a person who has become volatile from hurting themselves or others.
“The district strives to provide our students with a safe and secure environment and will continue to keep parents apprised when restraints occur involving their student,” Fort Worth ISD officials said in an email.
Former Boulevard Heights aide says Hernandez was restrained often
Hill, the Boulevard Heights teacher’s assistant, was the first one to intercept Hernandez when he tried to run out of the room. There was an understanding among the teachers in the building that they would need to restrain Hernandez anytime he got up to run out of the classroom, Hill said, because no one knew where he would go.
Generally, teachers would end up restraining Hernandez at least two or three times a week, usually face-down on the floor, Hill said. Hill said he’d been through restraint training as a part of his job before Hernandez’s death. He said he was unaware the maneuver was illegal, but he didn’t feel teachers had any other option because of Hernandez’s size.
“He was like 6 foot, 230-240 (pounds,)” Hill said. “He was a grown man, 21 years old.”
Hill said the restraint began normally. It took six or seven teachers to hold Hernandez down, Hill said, with each of them holding one of his arms or legs. There were no teachers kneeling or sitting on his back, or anything else that would have obviously obstructed his airways, Hill said. Once teachers realized that Hernandez had stopped breathing, they called 911 immediately, Hill said.
In response to a question about how its restraint training accounts for situations in which the person being restrained is bigger than those doing the restraining, a spokeswoman for the institute emphasized that restraints are only to be used as a last resort to keep students and staff safe.
“This could mean that multiple, trained staff members may be called in to help keep everyone safe,” she said.
Student’s family waits for answers
Ebonie Baltimore, Hernandez’s aunt, said the family has been unable to get any information about her nephew’s death from the school district. She’s frustrated that district officials aren’t more forthcoming about what happened and what was done about it. She questions why school staff used a prone restraint on Hernandez when such a technique is banned under state law and doesn’t comply with the district’s training protocols. Teachers who don’t know the proper techniques to use or don’t have enough self-control to use them shouldn’t be working at a school like Boulevard Heights, she said.
“They don’t need to be working with people who have intellectual disabilities,” she said.
Baltimore said Hernandez’s death has been difficult for her family. Her mother, Joyce Baltimore, was Hernandez’s legal guardian. When he died, she was heartbroken, Ebonie Baltimore said. Joyce Baltimore died in January.
Ebonie Baltimore said she’s met with several attorneys to talk about filing suit against the teachers who restrained Hernandez. But each of them told her that Texas grants qualified immunity to teachers and other school staff, meaning they can’t be held legally liable for their actions while they’re on duty, leaving her with little legal recourse. She feels as though no one has been held accountable for her nephew’s death.
Texas law leaves family little recourse, attorney says
Steven Aleman, an attorney and senior policy specialist with the nonprofit Disability Rights Texas, said Texas’ state statutes make it difficult to hold anyone accountable in cases like this one. The prohibition on the use of prone and supine restraints in schools doesn’t lay out a penalty for violating the ban, he said. State law also acknowledges that teachers and school staff encounter major challenges in the course of doing their jobs, and grants them a great amount of deference because of it, he said.
There are legal avenues for holding teachers responsible in cases where a student’s civil rights have been violated, Aleman said, but the standard for those cases is high in Texas and the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. That generally leaves families with few legal options, he said.
The Texas Education Agency could decide to sanction a school district that violates the prohibition, he said. Such sanctions usually take the form of requiring the district to take corrective action like adopting better training for its staff, doing a better job of protecting vulnerable children and revising its own policies to comply with state law, he said. They don’t typically result in anyone facing criminal charges, losing a job or being assessed a financial penalty, he said.
Although the state prohibits the use of prone and supine restraints in most cases, the prohibition itself is vague, Aleman said. Such restraints are included in the state’s education code as a part of a larger ban on the use of aversive techniques. An aversive technique is a planned approach to change a student’s behavior — “When the student does X, we intend to do Y to make that behavior stop, and we have a plan to do that,” Aleman said.
But a separate section of the education code allows districts to use restraints in emergency situations, Aleman said. Those two separate provisions in the law create a legal gray area, potentially allowing a district that uses dangerous forms of restraint regularly to claim that it only does so in emergency situations, he said.
Aleman said all that adds up to an unacceptable situation, in which no one can be held responsible when a student is injured or dies during a restraint. The failure exists at several levels, he said: Teachers and aides should have better training so that they’re equipped to handle students with behavioral challenges, and state education officials and local school districts need to be more transparent in cases in which students are injured during a restraint, he said. There also need to be better penalties in place for teachers who hurt students, he said.
“There needs to be better accountability both for educators and for the school districts that employ them,” he said. “Otherwise, there’s no incentive whatsoever to make any change in the system.”
