The last few months of Asher Vann’s eighth grade year at a Plano middle school were a time he’d like to forget. High school wasn’t much better, he said, especially his freshman year.
“It was horrible,” the now 18-year-old said during a phone interview with The Dallas Morning News Thursday. “I lost all my friends. I really felt alone.”
The nightmare for Vann began in March 2021, with a series of Facebook messages posted by Summer Smith, the mother of one of his friends. Vann was 14 and attending Haggard Middle School at the time.
The posts accused the teen and three of his football teammates of calling Smith’s son, who is Black, racial slurs, shooting him with BB guns and forcing him to drink their urine during a sleepover at Vann’s house. A link to a Change.org petition included in some of the posts identified the students by their full names, while one to a GoFundMe page urged viewers to send donations to pay for counseling services and private school tuition for Smith’s son. The News is not naming Smith’s son because he was a minor at the time of the incident.
Breaking News
The posts sent Vann’s life into a tailspin from which he wouldn’t recover for years. Those dark days have finally started to fade over the last few months, first with a jury deciding at a trial in October that Smith and her lawyer, Kim T. Cole of Frisco, had intentionally inflicted emotional distress on the teen and invaded his privacy. The panel ordered the two women to pay him nearly $3.2 million in damages.
On Jan. 30, Collin County District Judge Benjamin Smith issued a final judgment in the case, in which he upheld the jury’s verdict, and levied additional financial penalties against Smith and Cole.
Smith told The News Friday she plans to appeal. Cole didn’t return a message seeking comment on the decisions.
“I felt like a big weight had finally been lifted off my chest,” Vann said of the moment he heard the jury’s decision. “I felt so overwhelmed. It was just pure happiness.”
Outside the courtroom, tears welled in his eyes as he thanked his attorney, Justin Nichols of San Antonio.
“The hug he gave me after the trial was one of the most meaningful things that has happened to me in my entire career,” Nichols said. “It was just like years of being in this awful shadow had finally been lifted. It was an extraordinary moment.”
How it began
The series of events that sparked the social media campaign against Vann and the others began a couple of weeks before the first posts were made. Vann was celebrating his 14th birthday and had invited Smith’s son to spend the weekend with him. He asked three other friends to join them the following night.
It was especially cold that weekend and the boys bundled up before heading out with BB guns to go frog hunting at a nearby creek, according to the lawsuit Vann later filed against Smith and Cole. The boys decided to do a test to see if they could feel BB shots through their heavy coats, the lawsuit said, and took turns shooting at each other, according to the claim.
After getting back to Vann’s house, they stayed up late, watched movies, told jokes and talked about playing pranks on each other, the complaint said. When Smith’s son fell asleep first, the boys poured some apple juice into a cup, “dribbled a bit of urine” into it, then woke Smith’s son and handed him the cup, the lawsuit said. A video one of the boys recorded shows someone holding the cup to the groggy boy’s mouth while he takes a sip and then appears to spit it back into the cup. The other boys can be heard laughing in the background.
The boy who took the video distributed it to others a couple of weeks later, after he and Smith’s son got into an argument, the claim said. When school officials found out about it, they reported it to Smith’s mother.
Smith sought Cole’s legal help shortly afterward. Cole put together the GoFundMe page seeking funds for therapy and private school tuition. More than 4,000 people submitted donations that totaled $119,000, a screenshot from the page showed.
Smith’s social media campaign soon went viral. Not long after, major television news networks and newspapers were covering the story. Keyboard warriors sent a slew of vile and threatening messages directly to Vann or posted online. Protesters rallied outside his home, and threw bricks through a window at his house and his father’s business.
Summer Smith holds her son’s hand during a press conference in front of the Plano Police Department about the racist bullying and abuse her 13-year-old son faced in Plano on Friday, March 5, 2021. Smith’s son, a Haggard Middle School student, was called racial slurs, beaten and forced to drink a white former teammates’ urine during a sleepover. (Juan Figueroa/ The Dallas Morning News)
Juan Figueroa / Staff Photographer
Friends turned on him. Police launched an investigation. School officials weighed punishment options. Opportunities that normally would have come easily, like playing on a local recreation league basketball team or getting a part-time job, were no longer viable.
In February 2023, Smith was the first to file a lawsuit, suing the boys and their parents for intentional infliction of emotional distress. Most of those claims were either dismissed by a judge or dropped by Smith herself, documents presented at trial showed. The Vann family countersued and their case was the only one to make it to trial.
Nichols said financial documents offered as evidence showed the GoFundMe donations were spent on things like lavish meals and travel, streaming services, car payments and rent.
Vann was the only boy involved who testified at the trial, Nichols said. Neither Smith nor Cole, who represented themselves, called Smith’s son to the witness stand.
‘It was a crime’
Smith said Friday she disagrees with the jury’s and judge’s decisions, and was frustrated by rulings that prevented her from presenting some evidence. She also said she stands by her actions.
“What happened to my son happened,” she said. “It was a crime. It was an assault.”
Smith also argued she shouldn’t be held responsible for what other people posted on social media or did in response to her posts and media interviews.
“Did people take that and run with it, creating TikTok videos and putting out their own narrative? Yes,” she said. “But I didn’t do that.”
Nichols and Vann concede that handing the cup with the apple juice and urine mix to Smith’s son to drink was wrong and Vann has expressed regret for that.
“No one condones the boys’ behavior,” Nichols wrote in the lawsuit. “They all acted stupidly by playing with BB guns, and playing gross pranks on each other.”
But the attorney argued the “exploitation of the situation” by Smith and Cole, including outing the boy and their families to the public and using race to “fan the flames of outrage” in order to promote a fundraising campaign was reckless and cruel.
As a result of the jury’s verdict, Vann said he feels more comfortable sharing his side of the story, and is much more confident people will believe him.
“I feel really supported right now,” he said. “It’s a good feeling.”
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