A mother’s claims of her son being bullied by his high school teammates were strongly contested by the school’s administration. The mother of the Lake Travis High School football player raised concerns after discovering peanuts inside her son’s locker. Her son, Carter Mannon, has been severely allergic to peanuts since he was a 9-month-old baby.
“We had him sitting on the counter, and my husband was making a peanut butter sandwich right next to him. Carter reached his hand inside the peanut butter jar and ended up smearing it on himself,” his mom, Shawna Mannon, told PEOPLE exclusively. “He broke out in hives right away — it was a perfect handprint of hives. And that’s when we realized, ‘Oh, he must be allergic,'” she added.
Unfortunately, Carter’s allergies didn’t improve over time. Instead, they worsened to the point that they could potentially kill him. Carter knows peanuts can be deadly for him, his mom says. For preventive measures, he checked food labels and carried an EpiPen in case he had a bad reaction.
Carter was one of the youngest members of the varsity team. Shawna said her son enjoyed school and football immensely until a frightening incident in October 2023. He told her that during a team talk about where to eat, he mentioned his peanut allergy and showed his teammates his EpiPen.
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“The players were kind of giving him a hard time about it because Carter is a big dude,” she says. “They were like, ‘A peanut could kill you?’ Carter said, ‘100 percent,’ and that he could go into anaphylaxis if peanuts touched his eyes, nose, or mouth.”
Shawna then explained that two players entered the locker room that evening after the team’s discussion. One put peanuts in Carter’s locker while the other student recorded a video. “Then, the next day before the game, they went in, and they had put peanuts in his locker, on his jersey, and in his cleats,” Shawna says. “It was a can of peanuts that they just scattered throughout his locker and put in his cleats.”
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After the deed, Carter went to his locker to dress for the game. Shawna said when he grabbed his jersey, peanuts fell everywhere, and immediately, “he’s got hives already starting to develop,” she said.
Shawna claimed that one of the guys was showing a video of their actions to the others, and some were laughing. The heartbroken mother reported the incident to the school officials and the football coach. Eventually, the two boys were benched for two games, had to run laps at practice, and are now banned from the varsity locker room.
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However, to Shawna’s surprise, the school’s spokesperson said that the peanut incident didn’t classify as bullying under the Texas Education Code. “Upon concluding our investigation, it was determined that the legal elements of bullying were not met,” the spokesperson said.
The Texas Education Code defined bullying, in part, as something that “has the effect or will have the effect of physically harming a student, damaging a student’s property, or placing a student in reasonable fear of harm.”
However, Shawna insisted that there should be greater accountability for the incident. She also submitted a complaint to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights. The family’s attorney also informed TODAY.com that the next phase will involve an investigation. After the incident, Carter and his younger sister were withdrawn from the school.
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