What school safety means these days; beatings on video continue
Florida student's beatdown is just one of two major incidents in as many months
Five teens are in custody and a sixth is wanted in the Dec. 12 brutal beating of another teen in a student parking lot at Marjory Stoneman Douglas (MSD) High School in the Broward County school system in Florida.
Jahmeer Beauziel, 17, student at MSD
Sylvester Hicks Jr., 16, student at MSD
Caleb Hensley, 17, student at MSD
Jordan Thompson, 16, student at MSD
Chinua Leefatt, 15, student at Coral Glades High School
All five are charged with felony battery, so far.
The victim has not been identified but appears to be a white or possibly Hispanic teen based on screengrabs from the video of the beat down.
The attack was caught on video which shows the victim being slammed head-first into the pavement for which the victim suffered numerous injuries and a skull fracture as a result.
Witnesses told police the altercation began after an unidentified male walked up to the victim and punched him in the face, per warrant documents released by Coral Springs Police.
The then-unidentified attacker “incited several other males who then joined in the attack," and the victim "was picked up into the air and slammed back to the ground causing his head to smack the concrete pavement.”
According to the NY Post, the father of one of the attackers is blaming the victim.
Meanwhile, Barrington Leefatt, the father of suspect Chinua Leeffatt, told the outlet last week that the victim was the one who instigated the brawl by slugging his son first.
“That [victim] is not innocent, I’m telling you,” Leefatt said. “He was attacked first. I have video [of] that. My son is the victim here.”
On Nov. 1, a white student was beaten by at least 15 other juveniles in Las Vegas, Nevada. That beating was also captured on video.
The victim, 17-year-old Jonathan Lewis, was beaten unconscious and later died at an area hospital on Nov. 7. Lewis had been placed on life support, however, doctors were quoted as saying he had "nonsurvivable head trauma."
Lewis had been defending a friend from a group of bullies who had stolen items from that student.
Only 8 of the juveniles, all of whom are Black and Hispanic males between the ages of 13 and 17, have been charged with murder in the death of Lewis.
More To The Story
MSD High is well-known for the Valentine's Day 2018 mass shooting by then-19-year-old Nicholas Cruz that ended with the deaths of 14 students and three teachers.
Cruz had a significant discipline record. The Miami Herald cited Cruz as having been such an issue that he was transferred six times in three years yet he was never expelled, taken into custody, or referred to law enforcement for arrest.
It's been argued discipline policies enacted by Broward County schools enabled Cruz's behaviors to fly under the radar of police.
Broward's former Supt. Bob Runcie worked for President Obama's future Education Secretary Arne Duncan in the Chicago Public Schools System. The school-to-prison pipeline activism at that time generated the PROMISE Program and similar policies aimed at reducing suspensions and criminal referrals for minority youth - whether they deserved them or not.
While Runcie was in Chicago with Duncan, arrests originating in schools dropped 63% between 2012 to 2016 after he implemented policies like PROMISE.
Those same policies that enabled Cruz to dodge police interactions are still in place. The question now becomes, did those policies enable this new set of MSD attackers?
After reading about and being able to see these vicious beatings on video, one also has to wonder at the silence of so-called "school-to-prison pipeline" activists.
I’ve written about the “pipeline” and these policies in the past, highlighting how they are used to reduce minority student suspension statistics but do very little, if anything, to reduce violence and crime in schools.
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