SALINA (KS)
The Kansas City Star
By ERIC ADLER and LAURA BAUER
The Kansas City Star
SALINA, Kan. — SALINA, Kan. From the time he was a small boy, Jesse Mactagone dreamed he would become a U.S. Army officer.
His mom had painted the wall behind his bed olive green. His bed sheets depicted fighter jets.
“He never wore anything but camouflage,” said his mother, Jennifer Mactagone. “He knows every tank, every single helicopter.”
So, at age 14, when the time arrived for Jesse to choose a high school, the Auburn, Calif., boy leaped at an offer from his grandfather, a U.S. Navy veteran, to pay $30,000 a year for him to attend St. John’s Military School in Salina.
Website images of spit-and-polish students and a message of “discipline” and “a structured campus life” that promoted “qualities such as personal graces, confidence, respect, high moral character, and leadership” seemed the perfect fit.
“We didn’t send him to St. John’s,” Jesse’s mother said. “He wanted to go.”
But now, as part of a federal lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court, the Mactagones stand with a growing number of St. John’s families alleging their sons experienced the opposite of grace and character.
The Mactagones allege that Jesse was so severely physically abused and beaten, not at the hands of faculty, but by other students, that four days after he stepped on campus in August 2011, he needed to be rushed to the hospital. He was unable to walk with two broken legs, including a displaced femur.
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