Families of three Florida high school students who died after being hypnotized by their principal will receive $200,000 each in a lawsuit settlement.
The Sarasota County School District’s School Board agreed to the settlement at their meeting Tuesday night.
The parents of 16-year-old Wesley McKinley, 17-year-old Brittany Palumbo and 16-year-old Marcus Freeman filed the lawsuit against the school district following the back-to-back deaths of the three students in 2011.
After their deaths, Principal George Kenney admitted that he hypnotized all three victims – including McKinley on the very day that he committed suicide in April 2011.
Further investigation revealed that Kenney had hypnotized as many as 75 students, staff members and others from 2006 until 2011 and that he had been doing so illegally since he was unlicensed.
One former student Eric Williams, 20, was the first person Dr Kenney ever hypnotized. He told Good Morning America in 2012 that his SAT scores ‘went up 500 points after the hypnosis’.
When asked about her fellow students’ deaths, another former pupil Kallie Dremann added: ‘They are just trying to pick someone to blame it on.’
He has published a number of audio CDs which are sold on Amazon. One uses hypnosis to help defeat anxiety while others focus on sports – baseball pitching and batting along with improving basketball throws.
Kenney learned hypnotism at the Omni Hypnosis Training Centre in Deland, Florida.
