7 Comments

Civil suit? How about a criminal counter suit for parental negligence. I am all for holding public officials personally liable also when they let dangerous people out on the streets. We have a real problem here with the 1970’s style revolving door “prison” system in Holland.

Wow! That’s the worst slant I’ve seen on an article posted here.

The mother is suing because she had reported to the school that her child was being threatened by the kid that he ended up stabbing. Seems pretty straight forward to me.

1. Kid is being threatened at school.
2. Kid’s mother warns the school.
3. Kid continues being threatened and feels the need to defend himself.
4. Kid brings knife to school, when approached by other kid, stabs him.

If the school would have responded to the threat claims, it may not have escalated to the point that it did. And to the previous poster, it seems that the mother wasn’t being negligent. She knew about the problem and tried doing something about it.

Baumann: where’s the damages there? If anyone has a cause of action, it’s the parents of the kid that got killed.

“Wow! That’s the worst slant I’ve seen on an article posted here.”

It may be straightforward to you, but it’s not to me.

A kid was threatened at school by a bully. The kid and the mother informed the school of the threatening action. The school failed to take action. The kid illegally killed the bully.

I would agree that if the school was warned of the bully, and if the school promised to take care of it, and if the bully injured the kid, the school might be liable for those injuries.

But at no time was the school warned that the kid was going to commit an illegal act! That’s the point you have to remember.

Certainly, the school had a duty to protect the kid from known bullies. But at no point is it responsible for the illegal actions of its students without at least some warning of a propensity of the student to commit the illegal act. Millions of kids are bullied each year without responses of murder, so I don’t see how it’s foreseeable. I simply don’t see any point at which a duty was imposed on the school.

I’m torn on this one. I don’t think a monetary reward is appropriate here, on the other hand, bullying has really gotten out of hand in some public schools, and the schools seem to be content to either do nothing, or blame the victim.

(Bias Alert: When I was in high school I got beaten up fairly badly by a “bully”, including having my head rammed into a concrete wall. The pricipals reponse? “Well you must have done something to make him so angry”)

“Millions of kids are bullied each year without responses of murder,”

Such is true, and in the past a teacher or principal would take the offending Bully out back and give him/her a swift kick in the ass and a have his parents do tripple when he arrived home to insure the behavior is not repeated.

Today it’s the kids with all the power! Adults mean nothing, other kids have no real recourse sans what they can come up with.

One thing for sure is that there is really NOBODY around to help them!

It’s not that bullies exist, they do today as they did when we all went through growing up. It’s that the victims of said bulling do not feel they have any other recourse beyond defending themselves and lethal force seems to be popular on the TV, so WTF!

Besides they trimmed the gene pool of future bullies right?

Unfortunately, there is quite a bit of truth to the “kids have all the power in schools” bit, but it got that way due primarily to lawsuits. Since we as a society don’t seem willing to clean up that mess, the only option I see is counter-lawsuits (like this one) – lawsuits putting pressure on the adults to act like adults again (see someone else’s desciption of “swift kick” above).

Not sure what else to do about it.