Content warning: This story involves descriptions of allegations of sexual assault involving children.
If you or someone you know has experienced sexual assault, visit RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Hotline for help. Call 800.656.HOPE (4673), chat at RAINN.org/hotline or text “HOPE” to 64673.
HOBBS — Larissa paused as she reached for the door of the discipline room on Monday, April 27. As the first-period bell buzzed over the intercom, the seventh grader took a breath and pulled the door handle. She stepped inside to join some 10 students who had been assigned to on-campus suspension at Houston Middle School, their desks facing the walls.
As a staff member directed 13-year-old Larissa to her desk, others in the room snickered. She didn’t belong there. She was an honor-roll student, a teacher’s pet whose only discipline write-up before was a demerit for having her phone out in class the previous year.
Larissa looked at the floor as she walked to the desk and took her seat. She pulled classwork from her backpack and tried not to cry.
On-campus suspension, or OCS as students call it, is typically reserved for serious offenses — brawling in the hallway, bringing drugs to school, threatening teachers.
The incident that landed Larissa in the room that day was indeed serious: She had told school administrators that she was raped on campus.
They didn’t believe her. And as it turned out, neither did the police.
Larissa had been emphatic, she said, that the encounter was not consensual, telling staff that she was forcibly pushed to the ground and assaulted. She later relayed the same story to her mother, and to another professional involved in the case who confirmed to Searchlight that Larissa denied giving consent. That person asked not to be named because they work in a sensitive position related to children and are not authorized to speak to the media. Larissa asked to be referred to by her middle name for this story.
An attorney for the boy involved did not respond directly to questions about the incident at school, saying in an email that he did not “have a comment related to the consensual nature of the relationship.”
A report like Larissa’s should kick off at least two lines of investigation. Under Title IX, the federal student civil rights law, school staff must perform a thorough investigation of the incident, unpacking the complex and sensitive questions that come with allegations of sexual violence among minors and ensuring that the child’s education is not harmed. Meanwhile, police should conduct a thorough inquiry of their own into whether the incident was a result of coercion by either party, and if so, begin a criminal investigation.
Those inquiries could involve interviews with the nurse who conducted Larissa’s sexual assault exam, her friends, her therapist, and other so-called “outcry witnesses” who she might have spoken to.
Experts interviewed for this story said investigators could, and should, use trauma-informed techniques to examine the dynamics of the children’s relationship, which Larissa and her mother say was abusive and violent, and investigate whether either student had a history of sexual or domestic violence.
These are questions that have particular urgency in Hobbs, whose 52,000 residents in southeastern New Mexico’s bustling oil and gas region report rape and sexual assault at a rate 2.5 times higher than the national average, according to federal data. State surveys have found that students in Hobbs experience elevated levels of sexual assault.
Some states offer legal protections and oversight of their own, which can be more robust than those provided by Title IX. But when it comes to sexual assault and harassment at school, New Mexico defers to the federal government.
New Mexico’s Public Education Department (PED) “does not currently have an independent law or procedure which requires reporting and adjudication of complaints [or] reports of sexual assault or harassment involving only students,” according to Janelle Garcia, a spokesperson for the PED. The agency “does not have an appeal process for alleged mishandling of a complaint of sexual assault or harassment.”
And many of students’ federal protections have been weakened by staffing cuts and scaled-back enforcement at the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, which has shifted its focus to transgender athletes and other issues aligned with the Trump administration’s policy goals.
In the absence of state and federal oversight, local school officials often are the final arbiters of sexual assault and gender-based discrimination on campus.
To school officials in Hobbs, this appeared to be an open-and-shut case. The two students had been dating before Larissa broke off their relationship in the weeks leading up to the incident behind the portables, according to her and her mother. Crucially, administrators who saw the video didn’t think she was fighting back or crying out — as Hobbs Municipal Schools Superintendent Gene Strickland described it to Searchlight, “the evidence that we were able to obtain did not indicate that the child was in distress.”
“Anytime we have something of this nature, we run it through a Title IX test to see if there’s a Title IX inquiry that needs to be conducted,” Strickland said when asked what steps the district had taken after Larissa’s report. “And based upon the evidence that we had available, no, we did not believe that Title IX needed to play out.”
“That incident was handled as per juvenile criminal code, as well as Hobbs Schools policies and procedures,” he said.
What Larissa said was rape, school officials determined, was actually a violation of the student code of conduct, an infraction warranting disciplinary action for Larissa and the boy involved.
To experts in the psychology of trauma, not showing clear outward signs of distress, as Strickland described Larissa’s behavior in the video of the alleged assault, is a predictable response.
“The more stressed someone is in a situation like sexual assault, the more likely they are to have an impairment of the rational, deliberative part of their brain,” said Dr. Jim Hopper, a clinical psychologist and teaching associate at Harvard Medical School who trains and consults police and prosecutors around the world.
“A common thing is at the beginning, when they realize that they’re being assaulted or that they’re about to be assaulted, people will suddenly freeze. Everything will stop. Their mind will go blank. To just look at the video and to simply just dismiss what the child is saying she experienced — that’s not an investigation. That’s incompetence.”
School administrators alerted police to the situation on April 7, the day that staff became aware that video of the alleged assault was circulating throughout the school. Officials called Larissa’s parents the same day, who came to pick her up from the principal’s office.
Gabriela Campos/The New Mexican
Larissa and her mother left the school and drove to a local clinic for a sexual assault exam. Larissa checked a box on the form requesting that the exam be forwarded to law enforcement.
“At least the police will get to the bottom of it,” Ivana Hernandez recalls assuring her daughter as they left the clinic.
But police quickly concluded that no rape had occurred. In an incident report filed after the responding officer’s initial visit to the school, police determined that the encounter between the two 13-year-olds “will be consensual based on their age.”
Instead of investigating the alleged rape, officers confiscated the cell phones of students who shared the video and entered them into evidence for a possible investigation into the distribution of explicit images of minors, according to police reports. The reports do not describe the contents of the video, and it’s unclear what part of the alleged assault the recording captured.
Hobbs police declined to comment for this story, but said the investigation is ongoing.
Deliberate indifference
As Larissa sat in the suspension room, her mother sat alone at their home, making call after call to police. The detective didn’t pick up the phone, Hernandez said. She called the school as well, she said, demanding that they remove the infraction from her daughter’s disciplinary record and offer her counseling.
Most of all, Hernandez said she pleaded that someone — anyone — listen to her daughter’s insistence that she had been sexually assaulted.
“She told everyone it was not consensual!” an exasperated Hernandez said in an interview with Searchlight, speaking in her native Spanish. “She told the teachers, she told the principal, she told the police. I was there when she told them. How could they not at least investigate whether she was telling the truth?”
The school had made its decision, she recalls officials telling her. The boy involved had transferred to another school in the district and shouldn’t be a problem for Larissa anymore. In an email, the superintendent offered his condolences.
“Please know that I am praying for [Larissa] and your family,” Strickland wrote to Hernandez. “My prayer is that she doesn’t allow the experiences of the last few months define her and allows herself to set a course in front of her that is positive and productive.”
Like many parents, Hernandez said she didn’t know about the Title IX process, or about state statutes that could apply to her daughter’s case. She and Larissa had been in Hobbs for only two years, the latest in a series of moves since Hernandez arrived in the United States from Guatemala eight years ago, some of that time spent in a women’s shelter to escape domestic violence at home.
Hernandez describes how she had watched Larissa’s academic talents flourish, a point of stability in their lives as they moved from state to state and school to school, following her father’s career as a nuclear engineer in Georgia, Nevada, and now, New Mexico.
By her seventh-grade year, Larissa was settling into her new school, Hernandez explained. She made first-chair clarinet in the school band, took advanced placement classes, and served as a teacher’s assistant, helping classmates with their assignments after school.
Gabriela Campos/The New Mexican
Social studies was her favorite subject — she hoped her classes on the study of human behavior would one day lead her to a career as a forensic psychologist for the FBI. She showed a particular knack for science. Only weeks before her alleged assault, the school district had boasted about her on social media, highlighting her bronze medal in the anatomy competition at the State Science Olympiad at New Mexico Tech University.
But socially, Hobbs had been a difficult transition. The move from elementary to middle school can be rough for any kid, especially one who just arrived from out of town, and Larissa was unprepared for the rugged social hierarchies and the bullying that she said were standard in the district’s student culture.
Even more unsettling was the new, near-constant streaming of fights and sexually inappropriate photos and videos on students’ social media, which appeared on TikTok with uncomfortable frequency.
Many of those videos show altercations between students — some of them extremely violent, according to a review of more than 20 videos provided to Searchlight by current and former students. Those include a clip of a student throwing an apparent gang sign with his right hand, his white sweatshirt splattered with blood after a stabbing at the high school, and a video of a student convulsing on the floor after being kicked in the head in a hallway.
Other videos are sexual in nature.
Police records show that over the past three school years, officers have been dispatched to schools in the district to investigate 22 reported instances of child pornography or child exploitation — calls involving students sharing nude photographs or sexually explicit videos of other students without consent. (According to police reports, officers closed the majority of those investigations because the victims did not want to press charges.)
“The girls can’t be by themselves” at school without risking being harassed or filmed, Larissa said in an interview with Searchlight. “They have to be in groups, they can’t go to the bathroom alone. That shouldn’t be happening at a school. The students, and especially the girls, are afraid every day.”
Those instances have sometimes landed the school district in court.
Parents of Hobbs students have filed five civil lawsuits over the past three school years, alleging in each case that their children were sexually or physically assaulted while at school — a kindergartner who experienced suicidal ideations after being violently sexually assaulted by another student in a school bathroom, a student who was repeatedly sexually assaulted by a group of boys at another elementary school, a high school student who had a habit of taking lewd photographs of female students.
In all cases, the lawsuits claim, the school district failed to take steps to prevent harm and subjected victims to mental anguish, acting, as several suits claimed, with “deliberate indifference” to students’ well-being.
“There’s an epidemic of sexual and physical violence in this district,” said Joseph Zebas, an attorney who has represented students within Hobbs Municipal Schools for two decades, beginning with a 2007 case in which a student with severe intellectual disabilities was allegedly raped by another student in a bathroom at Hobbs High School.
“I’m sure there are horrible incidents that have happened at public schools throughout the United States,” Zebas said. “But this has just been one event after another. You’re just waiting for, you know, when’s the next event going to happen? And when it does, the district doesn’t take steps to protect the students. It just sweeps it under the rug.”
“Tell them to delete the video”
One such case Zebas represented, involving a student named Josh Lopez, made national headlines in 2018.
A standout eighth-grade soccer player, Lopez had been invited to play with the Hobbs High School soccer team for the 2016 season. When his mother, Kristy Lopez, went to pick him up from practice after school, she recalls seeing the coaches holding an unusual, half-hour-long meeting on the field, talking to players about something out of earshot.
Text messages on Josh’s phone revealed what the meeting was about: Students had recorded a video of a player being sexually assaulted by another team member on the school bus. The coach had told them to get rid of the video. Team members were sending frantic texts asking if it had been deleted.
“Tell them to delete the video,” one text read. “If I catch anyone with it Imm f–- them up.”
Kristy Lopez started noticing that something was off with her son. He had become withdrawn. Something was clearly bothering him. She hired Zebas for legal advice, and soon the attorney said Josh revealed the reason for his distress — he had himself been sexually assaulted at practice, during a separate, violent hazing ritual on the soccer field.
The coach, Josh told his attorney, was standing nearby but merely watched as he was pinned down by older players and sexually assaulted.
Lopez’s mother — then a special education teacher at Houston Middle School — said she immediately went to the high school principal.
“When I called to report that I had found out that my son had been assaulted, the principal told me that there was nothing he could do, and he hung up on me,” Lopez said, recounting a series of events laid out in a subsequent lawsuit she filed against the district.
Lopez’s lawsuit detailed further allegations of sexual assaults that had occurred during a team trip to a game in El Paso. As more heat came on the district, both Josh and his mother began to receive threats from other students and parents. At one point, Lopez said another parent attempted to physically assault her son during a summertime soccer game.
“The response was that it was our fault, that we were snitches,” she said. “They told my son if he ever set foot on the soccer field again, that they would rape him over and over again.”
Gabriela Campos/The New Mexican
“My son suffered for years because of this, not just because of the initial incident but because of the victim-blaming culture in the school system,” she said. “He couldn’t even finish his eighth-grade year at school. His whole life changed. No child should have to experience that. The school system is supposed to keep our kids safe, and they failed.”
Lopez said nobody from the district’s Title IX office contacted her family following Josh’s assault.
Josh filed a request to be transferred to a school in Lovington, a half-hour’s drive to the north, where he eventually graduated. He now works as a barber in Hobbs, and hopes to someday open his own barber shop. The district settled the lawsuit.
“I don’t really remember much from those days,” he said in an interview. “I kind of blacked it out. It took a long time for me to deal with all of that. I just hope things can change there at the district, at least for the kids who are there now.”
Superintendent Strickland said things did change following Josh’s lawsuit. The district has implemented strict safeguards against hazing in athletics and extracurricular activities, he said, and has created an anonymous reporting tool that students and parents can use to alert staff to concerns.
“Students and parents are educated on it every single year,” Strickland said. “It’s absolutely unfortunate that minors make poor decisions, and unfortunately those decisions have consequences. And so from a campus perspective, we’re making sure that staff are aware, reminding staff to pay attention to students, and if there’s behaviors that are concerning, to address them.”
“We do not believe that protecting students means simply responding after something happens,” Strickland later added in an emailed statement. “It means building systems and a culture designed to prevent harm, encouraging students and families to report concerns, responding when concerns are brought forward, and continually evaluating whether our practices are effective.”
“Not a proper police response”
School was dismissed for the summer on May 29, still with no news from police about the status of the investigation, Hernandez said.
Hernandez had a long list of questions for the officers on the case. Were they still dismissing Larissa’s claim of rape, or did the sexual assault exam sent by the clinic weeks earlier spur them to reopen that line of investigation? If they were considering the video of the alleged assault to be the only crime, what would that mean for her daughter?
Police in Hobbs have long struggled to solve sex crimes. From 2022 to 2025, the most recent years for which data is available, officers cleared only 12 of the 295 rape and sexual assault cases reported to them, leaving 96 percent of those crimes without arrests or closure.
Gabriela Campos/The New Mexican
The Hobbs Police Department’s quick determination that Larissa’s alleged assault was consensual, and the subsequent information blackout for the victim and her mother, as related by Hernandez, is “not a proper police response, I’ll tell you that,” said Mark Wynn, a retired police lieutenant in Nashville whose consulting firm trains law enforcement on sexual abuse and domestic violence investigations.
Police should maintain regular communication with the victim’s family, he said, and move quickly to turn the investigation over for prosecution if a crime occurred.
“The very moment the young woman said it wasn’t consensual, it should have been considered a criminal complaint,” Wynn said.
“I can’t go back there”
Larissa spent the first weeks of the summer break in her room, Hernandez said. Each day, her mother would offer to take her to her favorite restaurant, a Mexican food spot called Rosa’s — usually the enchiladas with sour cream sauce would be enough to lift her out of any bad mood — but knocks at her daughter’s bedroom door went unanswered. Larissa would leave her room only to take two PediaSure drinks out of the fridge each day, the only thing resembling food that she would accept.
After a few weeks the nightmares subsided a bit. The panic attacks that punctuated the days spent in her room eased as well.
But Hernandez said she started seeing strange new behaviors when they would leave the house to run errands together. A blank expression would wash over Larissa’s face, “her eyes looking empty, staring at nothing,” as her mother described it.
On more than one occasion, Hernandez said, she would enter these dissociative states while crossing the street or walking in the supermarket, coming to when her mother grabbed her by the arm to ask if she was OK.
“Sorry, Mom, I just went somewhere,” she would explain.
In early June, Larissa was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder during a visit to a local mental health clinic, Hernandez said.
“She can’t see the world the same way anymore,” Hernandez said. “Right now she is battling depression — it’s something that just won’t let go of her. She asks me, ‘What if I had fought harder? What if I had asked for help?’ She feels guilty for not having done more. She feels like she’s lost her innocence.”
After Larissa’s diagnosis, Hernandez filed the paperwork to remove her daughter from the public school system and enroll her in homeschool. Larissa was fine with it. In fact, she said, there was no other option.
Gabriela Campos/The New Mexican
“I can’t go back there,” she said, shaking her head when asked if she would miss being on campus her eighth-grade year.
Psychologists have coined a phrase for trauma involving schools, police or similar trusted bodies: institutional betrayal, a specific type of harm caused by the failure of trusted institutions to protect those they are charged with protecting, that carries both psychological and pragmatic consequences.
“It’s not just the assault,” Hopper said. “It’s not just the video on top of that. It’s the institutional betrayals by the school district that she thought would protect her, and then the police too. That’s a massive betrayal, and so this compounds the trauma. And you know, these are life-changing events.”
In early July, Hernandez said she got a phone call from a detective at the Hobbs Police Department. He asked if she would come to the station to meet him. She had reached out to Zebas, the attorney, who agreed to take her case. But she said her calls to police had gone unanswered. The detective’s call was a welcome development.
“Do you have something new about the case?” she asked hopefully.
“We’ve picked up a few extra phones” from students who possessed the video of her daughter, he said in a conversation that was recorded and shared with Searchlight. “I should have everything done by probably the middle of next week, and then I can send it to our DA’s office to approve charges. So I’m hoping by the end of next week we’ll have a decision.”
Justin Dominguez, chief investigator and spokesman for the Lea County district attorney’s office, said that the DA has not received any information about the case from police as of Aug. 28.
As Larissa was nearly through her first week of homeschool, Hernandez said she got another call, this time from the Hobbs school district’s Title IX coordinator. Hernandez said that on August 13 — the day before the final deadline Searchlight New Mexico gave them to respond to a final request for comment for this story — the district’s Title IX office opened an investigation into Larissa’s alleged assault.
Part of that investigation, the official paperwork explained, would examine “the circumstances surrounding the alleged sexual conduct, including [Larissa’s] allegation that her participation was not voluntary or consensual.”
This story was published in collaboration with The 19th, a nonprofit newsroom covering gender, politics and policy.
