CARLSBAD (CNS) - The Army and Navy Academy agreed to pay $1.75 million to settle a lawsuit filed by a former cadet at the Carlsbad-based military school, where the cadet was allegedly sexually assaulted in 1999, the law firm representing the cadet announced today.
The civil suit, filed by Irvine-based law firm Manly, Stewart & Finaldi, alleged that 60-year-old Jeffrey Barton, who was an administrator in charge of academics at the academy, molested the cadet when he was a ninth-grader in 1999, the law firm said in a statement.
The lawsuit alleged that Barton drugged the cadet in May 1999 and sodomized him in a bathroom on campus.
In a criminal case involving the cadet, Barton was convicted in June 2017 of five felony counts of oral copulation and one felony county of sodomy.
He was sentenced to 48 years in prison in August 2017.
Manly, Stewart & Finaldi also represented a former cadet of the Carlsbad-based academy in a separate civil suit in 2017. That lawsuit alleged that Juan Munoz, who was employed by the Army and Navy Academy to "run its military programs," sexually assaulted and molested a former cadet in November
2006, according to the law firm.
Barton was headmaster of the academy when the alleged assaults took place. In June 2017, a jury found the academy liable and awarded the former cadet $1,885,000 in compensatory and punitive damages, according to the law firm.
