Despite settlement, is problem solved?

Karyl Ketchum and Mike Wiggins display a large portrait of their 17-year-old daughter in the hall of their Balboa Peninsula home. The photograph of blond, smiling Hail Ketchum is surrounded by theater awards their daughter has won. She earned a National Youth Theater award as part of the cast of last spring’s production of “Rent” at Corona del Mar High School. Hail played Mimi Marquez in the musical, an HIV-positive exotic dancer.

“I never thought [Hail] would be teased or harassed — she’s a poster child for Newport Beach,” Ketchum said. “But even if she was the nerdiest kid in school or showed up every day in high heels and a bikini, she wouldn’t have deserved this, nobody would.”

Hail and her parents, along with the American Civil Liberties Union and the Orange County Equality Coalition, sued the school district earlier this year, alleging that school officials did little to stop four varsity athletes from harassing Hail with homophobic and sexist taunts in a video posted on another student’s Facebook profile.

The Newport-Mesa Unified School District will provide a written apology to Hail as part of a legal settlement reached last week.

One day last January, Hail, typically outgoing and confident, came home from a Corona del Mar basketball game acting despondent and withdrawn.

Ketchum confronted Hail the next day, after she continued to behave uncharacteristically sullen. Her daughter eventually told her tearfully that three boys at her school had posted a video on the social networking website Facebook, threatening to rape and kill her. The video had been viewed by hundreds of students at the school.

The three high school boys on the tape only briefly talk about Hail on the three-minute video, but what they said disturbed Ketchum and Wiggins so much that they called their daughter’s school the next morning to meet with school administrators.

“And then you take a sniper to her forehead,” one boy says, referring to Hail according to a certified court transcript of the recording.

In graphic terms, the two other boys then go on to briefly discuss raping Hail in the back of a pickup truck and killing her.

The boys also speak in disparaging terms of gay students at their school in the video.

“It looked like what I imagine the prelude to a gang rape would be,” Wiggins said.