Politics and Current
Outraged Black Mother Claims Several Parents Jumped on Daughter During New York School Fight; He plans to sue the city for $40 million
A black mother plans to file a $40 million lawsuit against the city of Yonkers after her 13-year-old daughter was attacked at college by a gaggle of oldsters who began a fight between the girl and one among their relatives, also a student, leading to a harrowing brawl, which has since gone viral on social media.
Days after the fight, Alenna Merritt stated that she had removed the child from Yonkers Montessori Academy and filed legal documents notifying the city of the impending lawsuit, maintaining that the school was negligent and inadequately supervising students, which could have prevented the melee .
The Legal Notice of Claim, delivered to the City of Yonkers on April 25, provides formal notice of the lawsuit before it’s filed against the city agency.
Merritt’s grievance alleges negligent supervision, negligent hiring, negligent infliction of emotional distress and other related allegations against Yonkers, the Yonkers Board of Education and Yonkers Montessori Academy.
This wasn’t Merritt’s first negative experience with the academy, after she filed a lawsuit in January alleging school staff sexually harassed her daughter by asking her to remove her bra and shake her breasts, suspecting she was concealing a vape.
Four months later, the harassment case remains to be pending.
Merritt said that when the fight involving her daughter broke out in mid-April, she thought, “Here we go again.”
“We have children who are not supervised and not protected.” Merritt said New York Post Office. “I’m not going to put her in danger and throw her into the lion’s den every day.”
The 42-year-old Yonkers mother also said she plans to file criminal and potential civil charges against the adults involved while the incident stays under police investigation.
After reviewing cellphone videos, investigators determined that a few of the adults also attacked Merritt’s daughter, leading to an arrest warrant for Nancy Rosa, 55, who was allegedly one among the parents who got here to the school on April 18 to beat the underage girl, police said .
She faces charges of third-degree assault, second-degree molestation and endangering the welfare of a baby.
The Yonkers Police Department has not said whether more arrests are planned.
The fight scene was so brutal that police were called to the school to crush Donnybrook.
The girl who was targeted, a minor identified only by her initials EW, said at the least five adult relatives jumped on her when one other girl chased her on the baseball field of the Montessori school for elementary and middle school students just before classes began.
According to reports, one among the attackers is the grandfather of the other student.
“I felt confused and scared — they kept screaming in my face,” the teenager told The New York Post during an interview with the family’s lawyer. “When I was attacked, I felt alone and scared because there was no one to help me.”
One particular video of the incident circulating on Platform X shows Merritt’s daughter being assaulted by a much larger girl who overwhelms the EW with a series of untamed, excessive-force blows to the head.
According to the claim, a gaggle of adults got here to the school looking for a fight and intended to find EW’s friend, but since that person wasn’t there, they turned their anger at EW as an alternative, Merritt’s lawyer, Mark Shirian, explained.
Shirian questioned whether the school’s security staff intentionally selected not to move in during the fight as a type of retaliation against Merritt for her other outstanding claim against the school.
He said Merritt and her daughter had been “traumatized by this ordeal” and urged the school to take “decisive action to rectify this situation and prevent such occurrences in the future.”
Shirian accused Montessori of “gross failure to ensure student safety,” calling it “totally unacceptable.”
In the recording, parents may be heard screaming and cursing at EW, before one other student suddenly attacks, punching EW repeatedly, while adults encourage the hitting and EW tries to defend herself by punching her in the back.
According to the initial legal filing, EW “was left unattended” and “violently attacked on the grounds of Yonkers Montessori Academy by students, parents and relatives of current students during school hours.”
The document states that the teenager “was brutally attacked and beaten, as a result of which he suffered serious physical, emotional and mental injuries.”
Merritt said she was “horrified” when she received a call around 7:30 a.m. from her daughter, crying that she had been beaten by a gaggle of offended parents moments earlier.
Merritt’s daughter is now participating in distance learning and can receive help from a tutor for the remainder of the school yr.
Merritt stated that she had no plans to return EW to school, fearing for her safety, and revealed that the girl had already been accepted into a non-public Catholic all-girls school, where she would attend school next yr.