Special needs student, 9, was sexually abused by a bus driver employed by San Luis Obispo County school district despite being convicted of “peeping Tom” charges. The county has agreed to pay her $10 million to settle the case.
In 2017, while employed by the Lucia Mar Unified School District as a bus driver, David Lamb is accused of abusing a 15-year-old girl every day on his bus for six months in a row. A detective stated that the driver exposed himself to the girl, showed her pornography, and touched her inappropriately. In 2019, Lamb was sentenced to 16 years in prison after pleading guilty to two charges of sexual assault. Because he wanted to escape a life sentence on several sex-crime counts, he agreed to the plea offer.
According to lawyers David Ring and Robert May, who fought for the child, the payment is the biggest of its type in an individual instance.
Convicted of “peeping Tom” charges, Lamb neglected to mention that conviction on his first job application to the school district serving Arroyo Grande, according to court records.
When district administrators heard of Lamb’s conviction, the girl’s lawyers said in their complaint, they notified him that he was immediately banned from ever working at the district. Lamb was recruited as a school bus driver only three months after the girl’s attorney filed court papers claiming that the district’s transportation supervisor helped him get the job. When Lamb was hired, the District went against its own regulations, Ring said. There was a severe shortage of bus drivers, and the company didn’t seem to mind that the candidate they hired had committed many sex offenses.
Court records reveal that Lamb would often drive off to a remote spot, where he would then sexually assault the young lady. That bus security footage purportedly showed Lamb sexually assaulting the little girl only days before, according to the lawsuit. It turns out the supervisor never even watched the whole video since she claimed to have seen nothing peculiar.