BEECH GROVE, Ind. — Three moms of 16-year-old Beech Grove High School students said on a Saturday in August, their sons were riding bikes in Beech Grove and stopped at a CVS to buy candy. Then, the teenagers rode down the street to Walgreens. When they left the store, they said a woman was taking pictures of them.
"At first he was like, ‘Is she taping us?’ He was like, ‘Nah, she wouldn’t be. She’s got to be taking pictures of something else, but then, it looked like she is taking pictures of us,'" said a parent of one of the teens, Carron Stephens. "Didn’t think nothing about it, didn’t think to tell me nothing about it. Just thought it was weird."
That woman taking pictures, they said, is the wife of Beech Grove School Board member Rick Skirvin.
Skirvin's attorney, Aaron Freeman, said Skirvin and his wife were at the store to shop.
"They were there to buy batteries," Freeman said. "As they were checking out, the cashier says something to the effect of, 'Hey, look, these young men are stealing some candy from the store.' My client snaps a quick photo, leaves the store. Sends the photo in a text to the school resource officer and the superintendent of the school he believes they went to school and that's it."
Then, the parents of the teenagers said they went back to the CVS after they noticed they were being filmed. When the teenagers got to the store, they said the three saw Skirvin and his wife again. Freeman said his client was not following the students.
"As I understand it, we go to a Walgreens looking for batteries, who doesn’t have them, and we end up at CVS a couple minutes later right down the road in Beech Grove looking for batteries," Freeman said. "I think the evidence would show my client was there first."
The parents said Skirvin asked the school if any discipline would be handed out.
"If you felt that something was wrong, or something was taken from the store, then you should’ve taken it up with the people at the store or, either, a police officer in that area," Stephens said. "Why would you send it up here to the school? Are you trying to tarnish their reputation? What’re you trying to do? These kids are athletes, they’re very well respected kids in the school."
"There’s no following them, there’s no ‘else’ to it. He never asked the school to punish him, he never asked the school to do anything," Freeman said. "He alerted the school resource officer and the superintendent."
Beech Grove Schools Superintendent Dr. Laura Hammack said in a letter that she and the school resource officer received three photographs by text and said, "three boys walked out of Walgreens with a bunch of candy." Then asked if "there was anything that could be done at the school level."
The letter also said the school won't be involved in the case, and Beech Grove police said there's no investigation. The teens have never been charged.
Freeman doesn't think it's a coincidence this lawsuit came within a month of Election Day because Skirvin is a candidate for mayor.
"The publicity here, I think, is more to do about the political nature of this," Freeman said. "I would frankly argue that if Rick Skirvin not be running for mayor of Beech Grove, I frankly think we never would have heard about this story."
The mothers' attorney said their motivation isn't political and only two of the three families live in Beech Grove.
"This is in our neighborhood, we live here, we shop here, we talk to these people," said Ebony Lee, a mother of one of the teens. "We're in and out of the stores. No, it just didn't happen. It was a fabrication, it was a lie and it was a false accusation."
Skirvin has until Dec. 6 to respond to the lawsuit, but Freeman said they plan to act sooner than that.