An Edmond Principal Ordered a 14-Year-Old to Lift Her Shirt for a Vape Pen That Was Never There

Oklahoma wrote the rule in one sentence. Title 70, Section 24-102 of the state statutes says that in no event shall a strip search of a student be allowed, and that no clothing except cold-weather outerwear may be removed during a warrantless search. Edmond Public Schools copied that sentence into its own policy. On a school day at Heartland Middle School, according to a lawsuit still sitting in Oklahoma County, Principal Veronica Johnson ordered a 14-year-old girl to lift her shirt, expose her bra and the top of her boxers, and spin. Staff were looking for a nicotine vape. They never found one. They never called her mother first.

Kristal Trenkamp sued in March 2023. The case is Oklahoma County District Court number CJ-2023-1168. It names Johnson, Heartland Middle School, and Edmond Public Schools, and the amended pleading added the City of Edmond. The girl is identified in the filings as S.W. The amended petition, filed April 17, 2023, and published by NonDoc, dates the search to May 10, 2022. Some early broadcast scripts said May 10, 2021. The operative complaint is the document a court works from, and that document says 2022. The facts pleaded underneath the date are not soft. Another student had accused S.W. of carrying a nicotine vape. Johnson and Officer Brooks, the Edmond police school resource officer stationed at the school, took her into the principal’s office. The office had an uncovered window onto the school’s common areas. Another student was present.

The amended petition says Johnson started with a metal-detecting wand on the girl and on her bag. The wand found nothing. A search of the bag found nothing. Johnson then asked what kind of underwear the girl was wearing under her pants and ordered her to lift her shirt high enough to bare her abdomen and the top of her boxers, and to turn. No vape was recovered. No warrant was sought. NBC News reviewed the lawsuit and reported the core of it. Edmond Public Schools said it could not comment on pending litigation. The complaint calls the conduct wrongful, extreme, and outrageous, beyond the bounds of decency, and says the girl suffered severe emotional distress. It pleads assault, negligence, invasion of privacy, and a Fourth Amendment violation, and it asks for more than $25,000 plus fees. Her lawyer, Shelby Shelton, later said the girl was pulled from the district into online classes and that the family was trying to sell their house to reach another district after the story went national. Shelton’s line was the one the statute already implied. This is a school, not a prison. Rights do not stop at the door.

Removed to federal court, then sent home

The district removed the case to the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma on March 27, 2023. The number there was 5:23-cv-00269, before Judge Scott L. Palk. Trenkamp amended. A motion to dismiss was denied as moot because of that amendment. On April 26, 2023, the parties filed a joint motion to send the case back to Oklahoma County, and Judge Palk granted it the same day. The federal action is closed because it was remanded, not because a jury decided who was right. Back in state court, the district argued that Johnson had acted in bad faith, which, if a court ever agreed, would put her outside the scope of employment and could shield the district, and that the plaintiff had not pleaded compliance with the Governmental Tort Claims Act. Those sentences are defense briefs. They are not findings. A widely reported verdict or a public settlement figure has not followed. The allegations remain contested.

The district’s bad-faith argument is worth reading slowly. If Johnson violated a written ban, the school system would like that violation to be hers alone. Oklahoma’s governmental-tort rules do give public employers a shield when an employee steps outside the job. A principal conducting a student search is not outside the job. Deciding how far that search may go is the job. The statute answers the question before a lawyer does. Strip searches of students are forbidden in every event. A wand that beeps on nothing does not create a new event. A window onto a hallway does not make the search less of a strip search. It makes the audience larger.

The Supreme Court already drew the line

The U.S. Supreme Court drew a constitutional line in Safford Unified School District v. Redding in 2009. Officials in Safford, Arizona, pulled a 13-year-old girl out of class on a tip that she had ibuprofen, a drug the school treated as contraband. They made her remove her outer clothes and shake out her bra and underwear. The Court held that the search violated the Fourth Amendment. Reasonable suspicion of a school-rule violation can justify a search of a backpack. It does not automatically justify a search that exposes a child’s body. Justice David Souter wrote that the content of the suspicion failed to match the degree of the intrusion. Ibuprofen was not a reason to look under a girl’s clothes. A nicotine vape is not a better reason. Oklahoma did not wait for the federal floor. It banned the practice outright. Heartland, if the complaint is accurate, broke a rule that was written for this exact overreach.

The ban has not stopped the practice from recurring in federal complaints. A December 2025 Bloomberg Law investigation found at least 40 federal civil-rights lawsuits since 2017 in which children said they were strip-searched at school, often over vape pens and other minor items, often without a parent being called. Oklahoma, Washington, New Jersey, South Carolina, Hawaii, and Wisconsin forbid the practice in statute or regulation. Lawyers keep filing because the paper prohibition and the office practice are not the same thing. In July 2026, seven families in Attala County, Mississippi, sued after a school resource officer allegedly made high-school boys strip, squat, and bend over because a bathroom vape detector had gone off. No e-cigarettes were found. A sensor in a ceiling is not probable cause to examine a child’s body. A classmate’s accusation is not probable cause either. Both have been treated as if they were.

The injury does not always stay inside a lawsuit. The AEGIS Alliance reported the death of Charlestown, Indiana, football player Jase Emily, who died by suicide three days after a school vape arrest and an expulsion. His case is not Trenkamp’s case. The through-line is the decision to treat a vape as an emergency that justifies a body search, a police call, or a removal from school before anyone has asked what the device even is. Nicotine aerosols and illicit THC cartridges were collapsed into one scare during the flavor-ban panic. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention later tied the lung injuries known as EVALI to vitamin E acetate in illicit THC products, a distinction The AEGIS Alliance reported when officials kept blaming nicotine vapes and when the Food and Drug Administration’s enforcement fell on smaller manufacturers while the panic remained. A school that cannot tell those products apart is a poor candidate to conduct a search the legislature has already forbidden.

What a parent can still demand

Trenkamp’s suit does not ask a court to rewrite vape policy. It asks a court to say that a principal who has already searched a bag, and who is standing in a room with a police officer and a window, may not order a child to expose underwear for an object that is not there. The Governmental Tort Claims Act may yet knock out a damages claim if the pleading is found defective. The Fourth Amendment claim does not depend on whether a vape pen is a good or a bad thing for a 14-year-old to carry. It depends on whether the state, acting through a principal, crossed a line the Supreme Court and the Oklahoma Legislature both marked.

No public judgment has closed CJ-2023-1168. Until one does, the honest status is this: a mother says her daughter was strip-searched in front of a window; the district says, in substance, that if it happened the way she describes, the principal was on her own; and the statute says it should not have happened at all. Parents watching similar fights can follow U.S. news and the crime desk at The AEGIS Alliance. A vape pen is not a weapon. It was not in the girl’s bag. Oklahoma had already decided that the search Johnson is accused of ordering is the one search a school is never allowed to make.