HOBBS - Larissa paused as she headed toward the in-school suspension room door on Monday, April 27. As the first-period bell rang over the intercom, the seventh-grader took a breath and pulled the handle. She entered with 10 other students punished with on-campus suspension at Hobbs Middle School, all desks facing the walls.

A staff member directed 13-year-old Larissa to her seat while classmates jeered. She did not belong there. Larissa was an honor-roll student and teacher favorite who had received only one citation last year for using a phone in class. She pulled homework from her backpack and fought back tears.

In-school suspension, known to students as OCS, is typically reserved for serious offenses such as hallway fights, drug use on campus and threats against teachers.

The incident that placed her in that room was indeed serious. She had reported to school administrators that she had been raped on campus.

No one at the school believed her. Apparently the police did not either.

When Larissa was called to the principal's office weeks earlier to give her account, staff already knew what had happened. So did many students. A video of a sexual encounter with another seventh-grader on patchy grass behind two beige portable buildings had been recorded by onlookers and shared repeatedly across social media accounts. Principals at other district schools had already notified police that their students were also passing around the video.

By the time she reached OCS, other students in the room had seen it. Larissa was certain of this as she described her suspension period during interviews with Searchlight. While she tried to focus on work, they whispered the boy's name, the same student she had reported three weeks earlier as having raped her. With each whisper the students stifled giggles to avoid a citation for breaking the no-talking rule.

Larissa had been insistent. When summoned to the principal's office she told staff the encounter was not consensual and that she had been forced to the ground and assaulted. She later told the same story to her mother and another professional involved in the case who confirmed her account to Searchlight. The person requested anonymity due to a sensitive position working with children and is not authorized to speak with media. Larissa asked to be identified by her middle name for this report.

An attorney for the boy involved did not directly answer questions about the incident, stating in an email that he had no comment on the consensual nature of the encounter.

A report like Larissa's should trigger two lines of inquiry. Under Title IX, the federal civil-rights law for students, school staff must conduct their own thorough investigation, navigating complex questions that arise with sexual-violence allegations between minors and ensuring the child's education is not disrupted. Meanwhile police should investigate whether coercion occurred and, if so, pursue criminal charges.

That investigation could include interviews with the nurse who performed Larissa's sexual-assault exam, her friends, her therapist and other witnesses who spoke with the girl.

Experts interviewed for this story noted that investigators should employ trauma-informed techniques to examine the dynamics of the relationship between the minors, which according to Larissa and her mother was marked by abuse and violence, and to check whether either student had prior histories of sexual or domestic violence.

These issues carry special urgency in Hobbs, where the city's 52,000 residents report rape and sexual assault at a rate 2.5 times the national average according to federal data. State surveys have shown Hobbs students experience elevated levels of sexual assault.

Some states provide stronger legal protections and oversight than Title IX. New Mexico, however, defers to the federal government on sexual assault and harassment in schools.

The state Public Education Department currently has no independent law or procedure requiring reports and adjudication of complaints or reports of sexual abuse or harassment between students, according to spokesperson Jannell Garcia. The agency has no appeal process for alleged mishandling of a sexual-harassment or assault complaint.

Many federal protections for students have also been weakened by staffing cuts and a shift in focus by the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights toward transgender athletes and other priorities aligned with the Trump administration.

Without state or federal oversight, local school authorities often become the final arbiters in cases of sexual assault and gender discrimination in schools.

For Hobbs school officials this appeared to be a clear case. The two students had been dating until Larissa ended the relationship weeks before the incident behind the portables, according to her and her mother. Crucially, administrators who viewed the video did not believe she was defending herself or crying. As district superintendent Gene Strickland described it to Searchlight, the evidence we could obtain did not indicate the girl was in trouble.

Every time we have a case of this nature we analyze it under Title IX criteria to determine whether a Title IX investigation is required, Strickland said when asked what steps the district took after Larissa's report. Based on the evidence available we did not believe Title IX was necessary.

That incident was handled under the juvenile criminal code and under Hobbs Schools policies and procedures, he said.

What Larissa described as rape, school authorities treated as a student-conduct-code violation requiring disciplinary action for both Larissa and the boy.

For trauma-psychology experts, failing to fight back or call for help, as school officials described Larissa's behavior in the video, is a predictable response.

The more stressed a person is in a situation such as a sexual assault, the more likely it is that the rational and deliberate part of the brain will be impaired, said Dr. Jim Hopper, a clinical psychologist and associate lecturer at Harvard Medical School who trains and consults with police and prosecutors worldwide.

A common reaction is that at the outset, when people realize they are being assaulted or are about to be, they suddenly freeze. Everything stops. Their mind goes blank. Watching the video and simply ignoring what the girl says she experienced is not an investigation. That is incompetence.

School administrators alerted police on April 7, the day staff learned a video of the alleged assault was circulating. That same day they called Larissa's parents, who picked her up from the principal's office.

Larissa and her mother left school and drove to a local clinic for a forensic sexual-assault exam. Larissa checked the box requesting that the exam be sent to law enforcement.

At least the police will get to the bottom of this, Ivana Hernandez recalled telling her daughter as they left the clinic.

Police quickly concluded no rape had occurred. In a report prepared after the officer's initial school visit, the officer determined the encounter between the two 13-year-olds would be consensual given their age.

Instead of investigating the alleged rape, authorities seized phones from students who shared the video and used them as evidence for a possible investigation into distribution of explicit material involving minors, according to police records. The reports do not describe the video's content, and it is unclear how much of the alleged assault was captured.

Hobbs police declined to comment for this article but said the investigation remains open.

While Larissa sat in the suspension room, her mother was home alone making call after call to police. The detective did not answer, Hernandez said. She also called the school, she said, demanding that the citation be removed from her daughter's disciplinary record and that counseling be provided.

Above all, Hernandez said she begged for someone, anyone, to listen to her daughter's insistence that she had been sexually assaulted.

She told everyone it was not consensual, Hernandez said, exasperated, during an interview with Searchlight. She told the teachers, she told the principal, she told the police. I was there when she told them. How is it possible they did not even investigate whether she was telling the truth?

The school had made its decision, officials told her. The boy had been transferred to another district school and would no longer be a problem for Larissa. In an email the superintendent offered condolences.

Please know that I am praying for Larissa and her family, Strickland wrote to Hernandez. My prayer is that she does not let the experiences of the past months define her and that she allows herself to follow a path that is positive and productive.

Like many parents, Hernandez said she was unaware of the Title IX process or state laws that might apply to her daughter's case. She and Larissa had lived in Hobbs for only two years, the latest in a series of moves since Hernandez arrived in the United States from Guatemala eight years earlier, several of which were spent in a women's shelter to escape domestic violence at home.

Hernandez describes watching Larissa's academic talent flourish, a source of stability in their lives as they moved from state to state and school to school following her father's career as a nuclear engineer in Georgia, Nevada and now New Mexico.