A Philly teacher and coach got breast cancer. Now he’s suing the district over years of asbestos exposure.

A well-known city teacher and coach who contracted cancer after spending decades in a building with known asbestos issues filed a lawsuit against the Philadelphia School District on Wednesday.

Juan Namnun, an award-winning Frankford High health and physical education teacher and baseball coach, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2022 “as a direct and proximate result of the defendants’ negligent, wrongful, extensive, and unacceptable conduct related to the severe asbestos contamination of Frankford High School,” according to the complaint filed in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court.

Namnun has taught at Frankford since 2001; he’s also a 1995 graduate of the school. Namnun’s wife, Lena, is also a plaintiff in the suit, a Frankford graduate, and a current Frankford social studies teacher.

The suit also names as defendants a number of companies that performed environmental work and testing at Frankford over the years, plus asbestos manufacturers and others.

The district and companies “failed to implement adequate testing and failed to adequately respond to asbestos hazards, which resulted in remarkably dangerous amounts of asbestos fiber inhalation in schools throughout the School District of Philadelphia for nearly a century — fibers which plaintiff Juan Namnun has inhaled for decades,” the legal filing says. “Only after facing close scrutiny by state lawmakers, community members, and the media did the School District of Philadelphia begin to address this ‘facilities crisis.’”

Monique Braxton, a spokesperson for the district, said she could not comment on pending litigation.

The grand, four-story Frankford building, on Oxford Avenue, was constructed in 1914 and closed last April because of asbestos issues, one of 10 district schools forced to close in the 2022-23 school year because of damaged asbestos.

The problem at Frankford, officials said at the time, was plaster throughout the school that had been erroneously characterized as “non-asbestos-containing.” The plaster, located throughout the school, actually did contain the toxin and was damaged. Untouched, asbestos is not dangerous, but once disturbed, it releases tiny, toxic fibers that increase the risk of some cancers.

The majority of the Frankford building remains closed with issues so extensive that officials said they were considering knocking the building down rather than going through abatement. Most Frankford students are currently attending school crowded into the school annex unaffected by the damaged asbestos-containing plaster, and the school’s ninth graders are based out of the Roberto Clemente Middle School on Erie Avenue.

School staff have raised concerns about a lack of details regarding the damaged asbestos, and how long it was there. A month into the main Frankford building closure, dozens held a public protest outside the school.

The knowledge that staff and students had been working and learning while possibly breathing in asbestos-containing plaster for years was terrifying, staff said at the time.

“We were lulled into a false sense of security,” English teacher Marybeth Reinhold said at the May protest.

In fact, Frankford wasn’t the only school in similar straits. Officials first discovered asbestos-containing plaster at Building 21, a district high school in West Oak Lane, that had been mislabeled as not containing asbestos since the 1990s. That revelation prompted the district to reexamine plaster at schools throughout the city; the average age of a district school is 74 years, and the majority of the district’s 216 schools are in buildings constructed before asbestos’ danger was fully known.

Juan Namnun discovered a lump in his right breast by accident, but he dismissed it as likely nothing. Weeks later, when Lena leaned against him and felt it, too, she insisted he get checked out by his doctor, who sent him for tests but told him it was likely nothing, a harmless cyst.

Namnun got a mammogram, a biopsy, and ultimately a diagnosis: papillary carcinoma, a rare kind of cancer to find in the breast, which confounded doctors, who found no genetic predisposition to the disease. Namnun’s surgeon said she had rarely seen a case like Namnun’s, and never in a man. Namnun underwent a double mastectomy and chemotherapy, reconstructive surgery, and scar tissue surgery and had to take multiple medical leaves from work.

He also worked to raise awareness of breast cancer in men (and has been honored as a beloved teacher, coach and cancer activist on live national TV, with tickets to a Phillies World Series game in 2022 from Good Morning America.)

Namnun, who is represented by lawyer Thomas Bosworth, is seeking financial damages from the district and other defendants, who, according to the suit, “have consciously decided to not warn or notify students, teachers, parents, and all those individuals who come into Frankford High School the fact that Frankford High School is heavily contaminated with asbestos which poses a serious risk of bodily injury and death to all persons inside the school building.”

Furthermore, the suit says, the district and city “continue to downplay the true and complete nature and severity of the asbestos contamination at Frankford High School to the general public, their student base, and their teacher base, including ... Juan Namnun.”

Both Namnuns continue to teach at Frankford, in the annex. Juan Namnun is currently in Florida with the Frankford baseball team; every year, he raises money to take his team, some of whom couldn’t afford to go on their own, to Disney Spring Training.

The school district in 2020 paid district teacher Lea DiRusso an $850,000 settlement. DiRusso was diagnosed with mesothelioma, a cancer caused by asbestos, after working for decades in Philadelphia schools with known damaged asbestos.