Mom: ‘He stole her innocence

• By SONIA SMITH
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Sep 28, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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Meagan Lynn Kolb, autistic and profoundly deaf, has never uttered a word in her 21 years.

When she was 6, her parents, Michele and Michael Kolb, decided to send her to the Louisiana School for the Deaf. While they would have preferred to keep their daughter nearby, they say, the only place in the state with the resources to deal with her multiple handicaps was the deaf school. 

Meagan’s education at the Baton Rouge campus ended abruptly in 2003 after Charles Hodges was accused of molesting her.

Hodges, a dorm worker, was chaperoning Meagan, then 15, and other students during a May 2003 trip to Milton, Fla. 

Hodges was sitting next to Meagan on a hayride when he took her hand and began rubbing it on his groin outside his trousers, according to Kolb and to reports on the incident provided by the school.

Two other chaperones saw what Hodges was doing but didn’t intervene, the documents show. They later reported the incident to their supervisor. 

The police were called several days later, after Hodges had been placed on paid leave by the school, the documents show. 

The Kolbs still wonder why the other employees did not stop Hodges on the hayride. 

“I think with any parent of a special-needs child, this is their biggest fear,” Michele Kolb said. 

The Kolbs filed a lawsuit against the school, which was settled out of court in November. They declined to discuss it because of a confidentiality agreement.

While she knows enough sign language to communicate her basic needs, Meagan is not capable of conveying how being molested has affected her or if anything else occurred, Kolb said.

Hodges, who is deaf, was a quarterback on the deaf school’s football team before graduating in 1990. Five years later, he began working there as a monitor in a boy’s dorm, employment documents show.

In 2006, Hodges was convicted in Florida’s Santa Rosa County of lewd or lascivious molestation, a felony, and was sentenced to 21 months in prison. He is serving his sentence at Okaloosa Correctional Institution in Florida.