The 15-year-old Santa Margarita Catholic High School student wasn't sure what to expect when he heard loud cheers and bangs coming from the varsity football team's locker room.

As he walked toward the lockers, one player shouted “Get him!” The lights were turned off and several team members slammed him against a locker, pinned him to the floor and took turns “touching, tugging, grabbing, pulling his genitals.” and rotated,” says a lawsuit filed Tuesday in Orange County Superior Court .

The lawsuit, first reported by the Orange County Register, details a disturbing attack on a sophomore football player that sparked a police investigation and left the boy with post-traumatic stress disorder, severe depression and anxiety. At least eight other high school student-athletes were also attacked by teammates, according to the lawsuit.

The Orange County Sheriff's Department has launched an investigation into the incident, according to the lawsuit. The Sheriff's Department could not immediately be reached for comment. A law enforcement source told the Register that the Sheriff's Department initially investigated a possible sexual assault but later determined the assault was not sexual in nature.

“Something like this shouldn’t happen in any school. This shouldn't happen in any locker room. This shouldn’t happen to any child,” said Brian Williams, a Greenberg Gross partner representing the boy’s family. “The adults responsible for such programs clearly need to do better. They need to better protect student-athletes and prevent what appears to be a systemic problem in this team’s culture.”

The lawsuit, which names Santa Margarita Catholic High School and the Roman Catholic Bishop of Orange, alleges negligence and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Lawyers are demanding unspecified damages.

Bradley Zint, a spokesman for the Diocese of Orange, said in an email that the diocese “cannot comment at this time and the complaint has not yet been served.”

The Santa Margarita Eagles football program is highly competitive in the world of high school sports and has produced more than two dozen players who have made it to the NFL. Head coach Anthony Rouzier, who was placed on leave in early October, made the announcement. The school said the trigger for the coach's leave was “incidents within the football program.” It is not clear whether his departure is related to this incident.

A parent whose child participates in the soccer program said he became aware of the locker room incident investigation within days as police questioned players at the school.

The parent, who did not want to be named to protect his child's anonymity, said the incident was “exaggerated.” The other players denied touching the student in any sexual way, the parents said.

The parents said the teens often played a game in which they turned off the lights and tried to “scare” other players, but said it was not malicious.

“It was like kids being kids. Nobody hit anyone. It wasn't even wrestling. It was a joke,” the parent said.

The boy, described by his lawyers as an athletic teenager, had enrolled in high school that school year and was excited about the prospect of playing on a prestigious high school football team.

But after the Sept. 24 attack, the student no longer wanted to play the sport, the lawsuit says.

During the attack in the locker room, the boy fought against his teammates, causing him to suffer significant bruising, the lawsuit says. He yelled “No!” and “Stop!” as several players groped him and others watched, the lawsuit says.

After the incident, he reached out to the team's coach for help because of pain. But another player stopped him, according to the lawsuit, saying: “This is football, you knew what you were signing up for.”

The boy's mother alerted Rouzier and school administrators about the incident. Later, during a conversation between the coach and the teenager, Rouzier appeared to be “more focused on (the teen's) comment that he didn't want to play football at SMCHS again than on the discussion of how such an event occurred in his locker room.” could happen,” the lawsuit states.

Less than two weeks after the locker room incident, the boy alleges in the lawsuit that he was attacked by students he didn't know came up from behind and groped him as he walked down the hallway.

The lawsuit alleges that school officials failed to supervise students in the locker room and “turned a blind eye to the tradition of violence that is deeply rooted in their football team.”

However, other parents whose children participate in the soccer program disputed the notion that staff tolerated any kind of violence or bullying.

“Contrary to these bullying claims, there was positive mentorship in the program from players, from upperclassmen to freshmen,” said Greg Carpenter, whose sons play on the freshman football team. “This portrayal is not fair to these children.”

This is the second diocesan high school in Orange County to be hit by allegations of violence within the football program in recent years.

In 2021, Mater Dei High School's famed football program was at the center of a lawsuit alleging a player suffered a traumatic brain injury following an incident known as “Bodies,” in which two players hit each other between the shoulders and hip you give up. According to video of the incident, the boy was hit in the head three times by a larger player.

In that case, the Orange County district attorney declined to file charges, saying there was “no evidence of hazing or other criminal offenses that we could prove beyond a reasonable doubt.”