Charlotte woman sues JCSU, saying staff failed to protect her from sexual predator
If Queen Miller had known how authorities would respond to her reporting a rape, she’s not sure she would’ve gone through with it. Five years later, she’s still fighting to be heard in court.
In 2017, Miller told police that a counselor working at Johnson C. Smith University raped her repeatedly decades before, while she was a teenager enrolled in a college prep program.
After she told Charlotte police, they had Miller stage a call with the man and recorded him confirming what he had done. Not long after, they arrested him. But the man was never prosecuted.
When a temporary window opened to allow child sex abuse survivors of any age to sue in civil court, Miller sued Johnson C. Smith and the prep program, accusing them of not protecting her when she enrolled at age 14.
Now the future of that lawsuit is up in the air, one of many held in limbo until the state Supreme Court decides whether such suits are constitutional.
“The past few years have been more traumatizing, in some ways, than what happened when I was a child,” Miller said in a recent interview. “I wouldn’t have gone through with it if I knew it wasn’t going to matter.”
Joining Upward Bound
Miller, now 39, was born in Charlotte and raised by a single mother who took her to several services a week at The United House of Prayer For All People. She took business and fashion design classes at Independence High School, eager to attend college and become an entrepreneur.
To that end, her mother and school counselors urged her to enroll in Upward Bound, a federally funded college preparatory program for low-income and first generation students. So, at 14, Miller signed on to the program’s local chapter held at Johnson C. Smith, a four-year commitment which required her to live on campus five days a week over the summers in the late 1990s.
At JCSU, Miller was assigned to counselor Michael James Peterson. Peterson graduated from JCSU with a psychology degree before working as an educator in Washington, D.C. and Charlotte. He was 24 years her senior.
The program counselor position, which Peterson accepted in January 1998, required him to guide students through both academic and social challenges during the four-year Upward Bound process, according to a campus personnel file obtained by The Observer.
When Peterson called Miller into his office one day, she assumed it was for counseling. Instead, she told police in 2017, he pinned the 15-year-old down, ripped her clothes off and raped her. Frozen in fear and threatened to keep quiet, she told nobody.
Neither Peterson nor his attorney have responded to The Charlotte Observer’s several requests for comment.
Assaulted during field trip
The abuse wasn’t limited to Peterson’s office, Miller said.
In July 1998, Upward Bound staff took the student on a six-day trip to New York City. They stayed at a hotel in New Jersey, where Peterson called Miller to his room every night and raped her, Miller alleges in her lawsuit.
On the last night there, Miller recalled running from Peterson’s room and finding one of the program counselors, who brought her to her room, according to her lawsuit.
But when school officials responded to a 2018 subpoena demanding “all personnel records and information” about Peterson, they included one memo that focused on her behavior on the New York trip that did not mention Peterson at all. Miller says it was shocking to see how officials honed in on a 15-year-old’s dress and behavior – none of which should’ve excused Peterson’s behavior, she insists.
School officials caught Miller out of her room at least once that week, according to the March 12, 1999 memo from Upward Bound Director Michael Gardner. In that document, Gardner told Vice President of Student Affairs Treva Norman that a chaperone caught Miller out of her room with a boy one evening.
The end of the memo described a warning to Miller and her classmates.
“Because this was in violation of our rules as it concerns trips, (Miller) was warned that day any recurrence of a similar action would result in expulsion from the program,” Gardner wrote. “The entire group was warned of this as well.”
Neither JCSU nor Upward Bound responded to The Observer’s questions about the memo or Miller’s accusation that it failed to protect her from an adult employee’s sexual assaults.
‘Certainly not a good decision’
The JCSU file’s next mention of Miller came in a flood of memos about the program’s April 1999 trip to Atlanta.
Program leaders wrote that Miller had been caught out after curfew. But this time, she and classmates also accused Peterson of having her in his room at night.
In a three-page memo to Norman, Upward Bound academic coordinator Kathleen Jackson described the incident.
On the evening of April 8, 1999, program leaders let students stay up after curfew to wait for a late pizza delivery, Jackson said. But when the teens went to bed, Miller wasn’t in her room. Staff searched the other students’ rooms but didn’t find her.
The next morning, Jackson interrogated Miller, then 16, about where the girl had been, the memo said. Miller said she’d gone downstairs to use the phone then gone to another student’s room – a girl who she refused to name, according to the memo.
“It was obvious to me through body language and facial expressions that Ms. Miller was not being entirely honest,” Jackson wrote. So she talked to a college-age staff member, who said she “felt the need to alert me” that Miller’s roommates had reported that Miller was in Peterson’s room “for most of the night.”
Armed with the girls’ accusations, Jackson interrogated Miller again, according to the memo. Before answering, Miller asked two questions: “What will happen to me? Will anything happen to him?,” the memo said.
Miller told Jackson that she’d been in Peterson’s room “just talking” about how he would do his best to get her into good colleges.
The next day, Jackson wrote, Miller’s roommates told her that Peterson called Miller on the hotel line and entered their room to bring her a laptop after curfew.
“I spoke to Ms. Miller individually about her poor decision making skills,” Jackson wrote. “I confronted (Miller) about her decision to visit Mr. Peterson’s room at such a late hour of the night… I also spoke to her about the way that she was dressed.”
Miller and an Upward Bound classmate, Rucelle Robinson, told The Observer that they don’t remember any instances of Miller violating the program’s dress code. Miller says instructors never pointed out the clothes that her mother bought for her, and Robinson insisted that Miller was far too shy to dress provocatively.
Jackson wrote that she then confronted Peterson. He initially denied having a student in his room, but when informed of the conflicting reports he said that Miller had brought him a pizza and that “time may have gotten away from him,” according to the memo.
“I then told him that this was certainly not a good decision and he concurred,” the memo reads.
Because Miller was a minor at the time, North Carolina law required educators to report any suspicions of sexual abuse to authorities. Neither CMPD nor JCSU records obtained by The Observer indicate that Upward Bound or campus officials informed law enforcement about Peterson.
Miller says no one affiliated with Upward Bound or JCSU even called her mother.
Getting out
After the Atlanta trip, Miller said she couldn’t stand to stay with Upward Bound. She begged her mother to let her quit.
But the nerves and nausea didn’t let up. Eventually, Miller realized she was pregnant. She had a family friend take her to the local clinic for an abortion, she said.
“To lose a child, as a child, that was more than my mind could process,” Miller said. “I just completely bottled it up and pushed it down.”
Having cut ties with the program, Miller didn’t find out until years later that JCSU fired Peterson for his “record of poor performance,” on April 19, 1999 – four days after the date of memos describing the staff’s discovery that he’d had Miller alone in his hotel room.
“I regret that this action is necessary,” JCSU president Dorothy Cowser Yancy wrote in the termination letter that the school later shared with police. “However, your actions have left us no alternative.”
Peterson returned to CMS, where district records indicate he worked in a variety of positions at multiple schools until 2016. When Miller’s allegations resulted in his being arrested in 2018 on eight felony child sex charges, he resigned a position at Lake Norman Charter. Miller said she was appalled to learn that he’d continued teaching up until the week he turned himself in to authorities.
Remembering and reporting
Miller says she pushed the trauma down for years. She never did get a college degree, and now lives in South End with several pets. But in 2017, while watching news reports of gymnasts testifying against Larry Nassar, she was suddenly overcome by tremors and flashbacks, she said. She called a family member into the room.
“I have to tell you something,” she remembers saying to him. And then, she went to the authorities.
After investigators subpoenaed Peterson’s employment records and found the memos, they convinced Miller to call Peterson, pretend to be friendly and try to coax a confession from him during a recorded conversation.
At first, Miller refused. But, desperate to give detectives enough evidence to put Peterson behind bars, she said, she dialed Peterson in March 2018. He spoke only briefly while police were listening in. Later that evening, he called her back – and she recorded that call too.
The other voice on the line, which police identified as Peterson in a March 2018 arrest warrant, responded that he’d never intended to get her pregnant, that sex with her was “ultimate,” and that he believed he had a “good sickness.”
“Did the age difference ever bother you?” he asked in the recording.
In another call that Miller recorded, one of the Upward Bound classmates whose memo was included in Peterson’s employment file assured her that she’d reported her suspicions about Peterson abusing Miller to program leaders.
“I personally went to the counselors and told them something was going on and they needed to check into it,” a voice that Miller identified as Shaquana Cohens Wolfolk — one of the students whose affidavits appears in the JCSU file — says in the recording. “Are they trying to act like none of this occurred? Well, that’s a lie.”
DA declining to prosecute
Armed with recordings and documents, police charged Peterson with eight felony child sex abuse charges. On March 19, 2018, Peterson quit his job at Lake Norman Charter and turned himself in. Mecklenburg County records show Peterson was booked on four counts of statutory rape and four counts of indecent liberties with a child.
But about a year later, the DA’s office told Miller there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute Peterson, she said.
“Who can I speak with to file a complaint,” Miller asked the DA’s office in a November 2021 email. “I don’t feel I’m being treated fairly.”
She still doesn’t understand how Peterson escaped a trial, she said. The Mecklenburg County courthouse has no records describing why, a criminal court clerk told The Observer.
Mecklenburg County District Attorney’s Office spokesperson Meghan McDonald declined to comment on the case, saying it was “too close” to pending litigation.
‘This is my last chance’
Her case rejected by the criminal justice system, Miller two years later took advantage of North Carolina’s statute of limitation reform to sue the university and Upward Bound in Mecklenburg County in 2020.
She followed with a similar lawsuit in 2021 in New Jersey, where Upward Bound students stayed in a hotel during the visit to New York City. While the North Carolina lawsuit does not name Peterson as a defendant, the New Jersey lawsuit does. She reported Peterson to Clifton, N.J. police last year.
Both cases are unresolved as the Supreme Court of North Carolina debates the constitutionality of the law that allowed her to file here.
Until 2019, when state lawmakers passed the SAFE Child Act, adults over age 21 generally couldn’t sue over childhood sex abuse allegations. That law eliminated the statute of limitations for such lawsuits for two years ending last December.
As Miller waits for the court’s decision, she said a court striking down the law would leave her without any options to confront the school leaders who she says enabled him. None of the school leaders who overlooked her plight should still be teaching, Miller said.
“I’ve tried everything, and nothing worked,” Miller said. “This is my last chance.”
This story was originally published October 13, 2022 at 9:44 AM.
