School Pays for Pokemon Card Misplay

California and the West

March 02, 2000|From Associated Press

PITTSBURG, Calif. — An 11-year-old boy whose middle school confiscated, then lost, his 161 Pokemon cards took the school to small claims court and won a $1,500 judgment.

"I'll be able to get more Pokemon cards," Rudy Donithan-Treat said outside the courthouse after the verdict Tuesday.

Rudy, a sixth-grader at O'Hara Park Middle School in Oakley, sued the school district in January for $5,000 after trustees rejected a $500 claim.

A monitor confiscated Rudy's cards in August, but when he went to collect them, they had disappeared.

Principal Diane Frost told Contra Costa County Superior Court Judge John M. Allen that the Pokemon cards had been disrupting the school. "On a daily basis, we found ourselves taking them away constantly," she said.

But the judge said that once school officials took the trading cards, they were responsible for them.

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School Pays for Pokemon Card Misplay

California and the West

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