Sheriff Told Teen to Take Down Posts About Coronavirus, Family's Lawsuit Says

During her sickness, the Westfield Area High School sophomore posted on Instagram three times about what she still believed was a scary brush with COVID-19, hoping to alert others, including friends and family, to the danger. (Doctors have noted that negative results did not always mean someone was not infected.)

“I am still on breathing treatment but have beaten the coronavirus,” Amyiah wrote in the third post March 26. “Stay home and be safe.”

The next day, a sergeant showed up at the Cohoons’ door.

According to a police report included in the lawsuit, Amyiah’s posts had made other parents at school “upset.” Amyiah would have to take the posts down or risk violating rules on disorderly conduct and be cited or arrested, according to the report.

Amyiah deleted the posts immediately. But Thursday, the Cohoons sued the Marquette County sheriff, Joseph R. Konrath, and the officer who showed up at the home, Sgt. Cameron Klump, accusing them of violating Amyiah’s right to free speech.

“What they did was just outright outrageous,” Amyiah, who said she has mostly recovered, said in an interview Monday. “It’s not the right way to do it. They could have done it a different way. The school could have called our family saying, ‘All right, is this stuff true? How is she doing?’ ”

The lawsuit also asks for nominal damages — “a dollar or something small with an acknowledgment that constitutional rights were violated,” said Luke Berg, Amyiah’s lawyer and deputy counsel at the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, a conservative group that has been involved in high-profile battles over voter eligibility in the battleground state.

The lawsuit came almost two weeks after Berg sent a letter April 3 to Konrath requesting an apology.

Samuel Hall, a lawyer for the sheriff and his sergeant, said in an emailed statement that Konrath and Klump denied that Amyiah was “threatened with arrest or prosecution.”

Hall told The Associated Press last week that Amyiah’s messages “caused distress and panic within the school system and law enforcement acted at the request of school health officials in a good faith effort to avoid unfounded panic.”

There have been more than 4,000 cases of the coronavirus in Wisconsin, according to data compiled by The New York Times; three of them are in Marquette County, which has a population of more than 15,000 and is roughly 100 miles northwest of Milwaukee.

In his police report, Klump said Konrath had heard about Amyiah’s posts from the Marquette County Health Department.

The health department did not respond to requests for comment Monday or Tuesday.

In a letter to parents March 27, the same day the deputy knocked on the family’s door, Bob Meicher, administrator of the Westfield School District, acknowledged that “there was a rumor floating out there that one of our students contracted Covid-19 while on the band trip to Florida two weeks ago.”

“Let me assure you there is NO truth to this,” Meicher wrote. “This was a foolish means to get attention and the source of the rumor has been addressed.”

Meicher said the head of the health department was involved in “putting a stop to this nonsense.”

The school district did not respond to requests for comment Monday or Tuesday.

After developing the dry cough and fever, Amyiah’s mother first took her to a nearby hospital, on March 22, a week after returning from the band trip to Universal Studios and Disney World, according to the lawsuit. The doctors said that Amyiah did not meet the criteria to be tested at the time but that she had symptoms consistent with COVID-19, according to the lawsuit.

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She was sent back to her home in Oxford, Wisconsin, and the Cohoon family was directed to quarantine for 14 days, according to the lawsuit.

It was then, according to the lawsuit, that Amyiah posted the first update on Instagram: “Hey guys… sorry I’ve been on a long break.. I wont be back for a while longer due to me noe having the COVID-19 virus… I don’t want the attention its just the truth… I am now in self quarantine and am not allowrd to leave my room and have an inhaler since they said to go home… best of wishes. love you guys.”

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For a few days, it seemed Amyiah would get better, her father, Richard Cohoon, said in an interview Monday. But March 25, her symptoms worsened again, and her mother took her to the emergency room at a hospital in Portage, Wisconsin. She was taken in an ambulance to a hospital in Madison, after which Amyiah posted again on Instagram, saying that she was “in the ER” and “might need to stay.”

Amyiah was tested for the coronavirus, and the test came back negative the next day. Some coronavirus tests are known to miss infections and, according to the lawsuit, doctors told the family that “Amyiah still likely had COVID-19 and had missed the window for testing positive.”

She returned home the next day and wrote the third post on Instagram.

On Monday, nearly four weeks after her hospital stay, Amyiah said she had mostly recovered from her sickness. She is still a little tired, she said, but her strength is back.

“I’m feeling a lot better,” she said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .