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Earlier this month, the North Carolina Supreme Court upheld key parts of the SAFE Child Act, a law passed with unanimous bipartisan support in 2019. The legislation extended the statute for criminal charges and civil lawsuits in cases of child sexual abuse. It also created a two-year window, allowing anyone to file a civil case against their abusers, regardless of when the abuse took place.
In many cases — about 250, according to the Charlotte Observer — that window allowed plaintiffs to bring cases that might have otherwise been time-barred. In court, the attorneys for many defendants — school districts, churches, and youth groups — pushed back on the law, calling it unconstitutional. Specifically, they wanted to quash an interpretation of the law that allowed victims to sue not only their abusers but also organizations that allowed the abuse to happen.
Attorneys representing insurance companies for those organizations also focused on the constitutionality of the two-year window — for the obvious reason that fewer plaintiffs meant fewer claims to pay out.
That’s what happened here in New Hanover County, where Liberty Mutual — which along with its subsidiaries insures the district — hoped to have 10 of the 14 victims tossed from the case filed against former high school teacher Michael Earl Kelly and the school district.
The Kelly lawsuit has since been settled. But others, including one filed by three victims of former New Hanover County teacher and convicted abuser Peter Michael Frank, can now go forward thanks to the court’s ruling.
I wrote a bit about this in last week’s edition of The Dive (the joint newsletter we produce with The Assembly). But there was a lot of backstory that we just couldn’t fit in. In some ways, there’s no way to tell the whole story — there’s too much to cover, and too much we don’t know (and will probably never know) about abuse in the New Hanover County school district.
Still, I want to provide some sense of the chronological scale of this story: how long it takes before things come to light, how long afterward the shocks reverberate, and how long it takes justice to arrive — if it ever truly, fully does.
My first experience with New Hanover County Schools was in early 2017. I had just started as a reporter for Port City Daily a few months earlier, and I was working late when my editor got a message from a concerned father.
The story he told struck my editor as outlandish. We were a young media start-up, really just a few years old, and so we did attract a lot of calls and emails from people with crackpot stories, people who’d been rejected by more established outlets. Still, my boss let me take the story, at least to see for myself whether it was legit.
As complicated and convoluted as it seemed, the story wasn’t crazy. Over the next several months, I met with the father — a Sheriff’s deputy named Randy Johnson — several times. I also interviewed his daughter, who had been abused off-campus in 2015. The family claimed that NHCS had done little to make sure she wouldn’t run into her assailant at school. And, as they had pushed the issue, the school had allegedly retaliated in a host of ways. It was bonkers. But Johnson had documentation for nearly all of it, including a Title IX complaint he’d filed with the federal government.
Reporting out the story, I got a lot of pushback. People said derogatory things about Johnson and his daughter. They made excuses for her assailant — a promising athlete at the time — and asked if I wanted to be responsible for ‘ruining’ his career. They told me other people had dropped the story because it was a “he-said, she-said,” or “tabloid,” or just “bullshit.” My editor and I butted heads plenty, but to his credit, he didn’t let me throw in the towel.
As I was wrapping up my reporting, I requested an interview with Dr. Tim Markley and Dr. Rick Holliday, the superintendent and deputy superintendent at the time. It was a short and awkward conversation, held behind several sets of closed doors at the district’s administrative building on Carolina Beach Road.
Holliday spent the interview with a Bluetooth headset on, occasionally twitching in response to some message in his ear. Markley looked seasick the whole time. We had to work in hypotheticals because they refused to address the actual situation, citing student privacy laws.
One main takeaway was that Holliday, who had been named Title IX director, had very little idea how the federal law actually worked. When I suggested that failing to keep a hypothetical student away from her assailant violated her right to a quality education, which could be a Title IX violation, Holliday blithely told me the law only applied to things like sports teams having equivalent facilities.
When I got up to leave, Markley told me, somewhat cryptically, “Good luck.” It was the last sit-down interview they’d ever grant me.
My editor had my back, but it still took days of hemming and hawing, working line by line through my report before our VP and attorney would green light it. It was June, and I remember standing outside on a hot Sunday afternoon, while the rest of the residents at my apartment complex lounged by the pool. We got stuck on a particular word at one point; I remember just shouting the word, incredulous that this was going to be the sticking point. My neighbors must have thought I’d lost my mind.
The next day, we published. We got a lot of blowback, but no lawsuits (our attorney was very pleased about that). And I got calls from other people with their own concerns about NHCS. A lot of calls.
As I followed the story, the district would get increasingly defensive, at times going after me professionally. I sat through at least one internal disciplinary meeting. I was acquitted, so to speak, but our higher-ups implied that I maybe report on something less controversial. I think they suggested food trucks.
“You love food trucks, Ben,” our VP told me. (It was true. I do.)
I asked my editor if I should follow that advice. He was a hard-headed Massachusetts guy with almost no filter, so at least I’d get a straight answer.
“Nah,” he said. “Fuck ‘em.”
So I kept at it.
Over three years later, the district would finally admit it failed to correctly handle the Johnsons’ situation, part of a federally-mandated report stemming from their Title IX complaint. By that time, Markley, Holliday, and all of the original board members who’d been there back in 2017 were gone. I had moved on from Port City Daily to WHQR. I’d been waiting for some resolution for a long time but, when it came, it felt somehow anticlimactic.
About a year after that first story was published, I found myself in a meeting room on the third floor of the New Hanover County library in downtown Wilmington. It was a small gathering of people who had all started talking about their shared concern: a disturbing pattern of negligence, abuse, and retaliation in the public school system. Michael Earl Kelly had been arrested. The community was in shock. But in that room, I first gleaned that he might have been the tip of the iceberg.
The advocates compared notes, at times confirming each other’s suspicions, triggering downcast eyes, clenched fists, sharp exhalations. The mood was cautious, tense. I wasn’t sure how they felt about a reporter being there. I don’t think they were sure either.
In the coming years, the group would grow. I’d get to know a lot of them: Pender County NAACP president Rev. Dante Murphy, UNCW Prof. Clyde Edgerton, former NHCS student and heavyweight wrestling champ Chris Sutton, who’d known some of Kelly’s victims, social worker Angie Kahney, and union leader Lynn Shoemaker (there were others, too, who helped from the background but who’d probably rather not be named). These folks came from pretty different backgrounds, and it’s unlikely most of them would have crossed paths socially if not for the one thing they had in common.
No one could get answers, not from the superintendent, not from the school board, not from law enforcement. So these advocates did the only thing they could. They kept the pressure up — on the school, the Sheriff’s office, the DA, the media, and the public.
The school district, in particular, had been opaque. They stonewalled journalists and dismissed reporting about the district.
To give you an example: in 2012, the school board was notified by its HR director that the StarNews was preparing to run a story on April Marie Schaefer, who had abused a student, a 13-year-old girl, while teaching at Roland Grise Middle School.
According to records that were shared with me anonymously, one board member called it “tabloid journalism” in an email, and said they wished the paper would “tackle real issues.”
By 2018, a few of the board members had agreed to talk to me, but only off the record. They admitted to some past mistakes, but they wouldn’t say so publicly. There were good people on the board, I honestly believe that. But they seemed committed to protecting the district’s reputation. Even if that meant looking the other way.
Truth will out, though. And a lot of the things the advocates were concerned about, ended up being true. Over and over, school employees were arrested for sexually abusing students; over and over, there had been warning signs. Michael Earl Kelly. Nicholas Lavon Oates. Peter Michael Frank.
The names were like curses, like incantations. There was a terrible ambivalence. Each name meant, more and more concretely, that they — that we — hadn’t been crazy. But each name also meant a crime, or crimes, a litany of tragedies.
I remember the first time I talked to one of the victims. His life — his marriage, his career — it had all been destroyed. He’d never had the resources to deal with the psychological trauma, leaving him with makeshift, and sometimes toxic, coping mechanisms. He was so matter of fact, it stunned me. After we hung up, I just sat there at my desk, struggling to process it. I don’t know for how long.
After the arrests, there was a great scattering. Holliday got a closed-door retirement party from the district and a lifetime achievement award from Sheriff Ed McMahon. Superintendent Tim Markley was allowed to resign, with a golden parachute, even though he was under investigation for retaliating against a parent. Other top administrators retired or resigned. Board members lost elections or just slunk away.
Yes, the abusers had been arrested. But how had they been allowed to prey on students for so long? People felt an understandable need to hold someone accountable for that — but it was very difficult.
Maybe it was that the crimes at New Hanover County Schools required so many people to fail – through negligence, incompetence, or arrogance – that the blame was simply spread too thin. Everyone was responsible, so no one was responsible. The public was overwhelmed.
One silver lining: the roots of the partnership that WHQR, Port City Daily, and WECT have now were born back then. Reporters started sharing information and contacts, unofficially working together. I called Ann McAdams, who had been digging into the district for years, to compare notes, and later asked WECT if we could publish one of her pieces. WHQR’s Rachel Lewis Hilburn called me for a conversation about the schools.
We almost had to collaborate. There was too much to tackle for any one outlet. Sometimes, it was too much to take for any one reporter. We were overwhelmed, too.
I remember an interview for a story in the spring of 2019. I was sitting in front of a store in a strip mall on Oleander Drive, talking to a young woman who had been failed by the school district. She’d been sexually assaulted on a bus, and forced to continue riding it with her assailant. Eventually, she’d been sent to the district’s disciplinary school – an ironic twist of the knife.
With her permission, I recorded the conversation on my phone. At one point, she just started quietly crying. I froze for a moment, then did my best to comfort her. I told her to take all the time she needed. But she was on her lunch break, she told me, and needed to finish telling her story and get back to work.
When I got back to my office at Port City Daily, I listened to the audio to transcribe it. When I got to that part of the recording I wanted to turn it off, or skip over it. I wanted to email a copy to the school board, so they could hear what I’d heard. I wanted to put my fist through the drywall.
But I didn’t. I listened to the recording again, all the way through, and finished my transcription. Then I wrote the article, scheduled it to be published the next day, and went home. This is the job, I told myself, just leave it at work. But I didn’t do that, either.
Most of the reporters who covered the school district during those years are gone now, many have left reporting entirely. I still keep in touch with some. With others, I feel like they’d rather not be reminded. I don’t blame them. I’ve seen work-life balance (already kind of a joke for journalists) spin out of control in all manner of ways: burnout, mental health crises, substance abuse — you name it.
Every story like this, you take a piece of it home. And it takes a piece of you.
I’m not sharing this because I want sympathy. Like I said, this is the job. I share this because it’s the baseline. You get involved in this story, even tangentially, there’s a cost. And to be clear, it was so much harder for the advocates. And, of course, it was hardest, immeasurably hard, for the victims.
I’ve covered this story for eight years. But I’ve also covered a lot of other things. I suppose it’s all relative but, certainly, some seemed more important than others. I did, in fact, end up covering quite a few food trucks. Point being: I could walk away, for a moment — or a little longer —from the seemingly endless aftermath of what happened at New Hanover County Schools.
Even some of the advocates had to take a knee now and then. And I know it tore them up inside, because they told me. They felt guilty because they could take a break.
There are, we know, dozens of people abused in our schools who could not.
The bond that brought the advocates together has not always held. When it came to pushing for the truth, it was natural for us to all be on the same team — advocates, parents, reporters, all of us. And when it came to protecting kids from a clear threat — sexual abuse — it wasn’t hard to set aside political differences. There was a moral clarity, too. When you face evil, it’s easy to greet it with fire.
But as the years ground on, things got more complicated. Tempers have flared, including mine. There’s been some falling out. I suppose that happens. I’ve seen the push for truth, the desire to protect kids, politicized and even weaponized, in ways I would not have recognized back in 2018. Maybe I should have seen that coming.
It’s hard to keep that original focus — the one I had eight years ago, when I first spoke to Randy Johnson. After all the investigations and arrests, the convictions and pleas, lawsuits and appeals, the campaigns and elections. I’ve forgotten more conversations about this stuff than I can remember. Hell, sometimes I have to Google my own reporting to remind myself, to keep it all straight.
One thing that’s kept those advocates going — that’s kept me going — was the victims. That probably sounds a bit cliche, but it’s true. I’d spoken to a few over the years, along with their friends and families. I’d read transcripts and affidavits and watched video depositions. The victims were struggling: broken marriages and families, stunted careers, mounting debt and dwindling resources, hospital visits, medical commitments, and at least eight suicide attempts. I watched one interview of a grieving mother, struggling to get words out through the tears; while her son never blamed her, she held herself responsible for not doing enough to protect him. She took her own life two weeks after that was filmed.
The crimes were hard to hear about. The long-term damage, though, was harder to grapple with — and it felt like it was getting buried. There was a lot of coverage of the crimes and the legal wrangling. Somehow the young men and women had slipped into the background.
Part of that was by legal design: Kelly’s victims had filed their civil suit anonymously, and the victims in the criminal cases were all minors, their identities withheld. No one had an issue with that. But at the same time, it’d allowed the cases to become abstract, like some bloodless policy debate.
In May of 2023, I got permission from the victims and their attorneys in the Kelly case to share some written and audio testimony. But I found myself conflicted about whether – and how – to share it. I didn’t want to be responsible for another round of true-crime sensationalism, ‘trauma porn,’ as I’ve heard it referred to.
In the end, I did publish some of it. I didn’t expect it to change any minds at Liberty Mutual. They were only doing what insurance companies are built to do. If they’d had a heart, it would have broken by then.
But I hoped it would give people some sense of what the stakes really were. What they’d been the whole time.
A month later, the Kelly case settled.
I think a lot of us had expected to feel good about that – or at least to feel some closure. But we didn’t, really. It didn’t feel settled at all.
When Michael Earl Kelly was arrested, he’d been abusing students for nearly two decades. It took another year and a half to bring him to trial. Four more years passed before the civil suit settled for $5.75 million. That sounds like a lot, before you take out legal fees and taxes, factor in inflation and accrued debt, and divide it among 14 victims, who’d endured years, sometimes decades, of suffering.
For some, it worked out to a few thousand dollars a year. I don’t know how you put a price on having your life derailed, but I’m sure some would argue this wasn’t enough.
Two months later, then-Attorney General Josh Stein officially closed a four-year State Bureau of Investigation case on NHCS. Stein said the district’s employees failed to protect children, but didn’t bring any charges.
Before the announcement, prosecutors met privately to discuss the case with advocates. They were apologetic and, at point, audibly upset — toeing the line of discussing specific individuals they wanted to charge, but ultimately couldn’t, either because of statutes of limitations or because they weren’t able to prove they were knowingly acting illegally (the legal term is mens rea).
The public reaction to Stein’s announcement was decidedly negative: frustration, confusion, and anger. And, despite calls from advocates, victims, and even the school board to release the investigation report, the state has kept it private.
A few advocates have held out hope that they could sue for its release. I’ve spoken to several attorneys who handle public records and media law; few have been optimistic that this kind of suit could be successful. (If you’re reading this and think otherwise, drop me a line.)
Meanwhile, three of Kelly’s victims still have a pending lawsuit against NHCS. Three of Peter Michael Frank’s victims do as well, and their case is now moving forward again under the SAFE Child Act.
Joel Rhine, who has represented victims of Kelly and Peter Michael Frank for years, told me he knows there are more victims in both cases who are not time-barred. Whether or not they’ll come forward, I can’t say.
I’ve spent eight years watching victims, advocates, attorneys, and reporters (myself included), fight for justice. And I want to tell you they won — that we won — or at least that we’re close, that we’re winning. It’s pretty to think so.
There have been some wins, for sure. But it’s hard not to feel ambivalent about it.
There’s much more I could say. Some of you will perhaps think I’ve already said too much. In either case, I’ll leave it here. There’s probably no way to paint a complete picture, no way to tell the whole long, sad saga of the New Hanover County Schools district.
But I do know this: the story’s not over.
