HARDIN CO.—A Hardin County family is wondering if their eighth-grade boy could have avoided a severe beating today in the cafeteria of Hardin County Schools if action had been taken on texts sent to him the night before.
According to sources close to the family, the situation with the boy arose earlier this week when he was being harassed in class by another boy.
The harassing boy was calling the kid in question a “cocksucker” and saying equally-vile things about his mother.
The kid tried to ignore the harassment (which, apparently, was “not heard” by any adult in the classroom) but when it got to be too much, he did what any red-blooded teen would do: he got up and punched the harassing kid in the face.
Of course, the boy (who is rather big for his age, and outweighed/outsized his harasser by quite a bit) got in trouble for punching. Not the rotten kid with the foul mouth. But, to show that he’s a decent fellow, the kid who was being harassed called his tormenter the next day and apologized to him. The harassing boy (who was by now sporting a black eye) accepted the apology and everybody thought everything was fine.
That is, until a group of hoodlums began harassing the kid by sending him texts.
These texts were being sent by a group of black kids (the boy in question is white), who were telling this eighth-grader that they were going to “beat him dead.” These texts went on for the better part of last night, April 18, 2013.
So the mother printed the texts out last night and took them up to the police department (our understanding was that it was Elizabethtown, but that might not be the situation, it might be somewhere else; we’re working on that). And, according to our sources, nothing was done in response to them.
This morning (04.19.13) the kid goes off to school, having an appointment at 1 p.m. for something, and for which his mother was going to pick him up shortly before.
His mother arrived before 1 and the school principal approached her, advising her that there was “bad news.”
The “bad news” was that the boy “had been hit.”
The mother was told that the kid was having the regular 11:30 lunch time, and was seated in the cafeteria with s table full of girls. An older boy (we’re hearing he was age 16) approached the younger, telling him to “take his glasses off.” When the younger boy refused, they argued verbally for a minute about it, then, right there in the middle of lunch, the older boy attacked the younger. There were two adults supervising the cafeteria. Apparently neither of them responded in order to pull the boys apart.
The younger boy had been sitting at the school for about an hour and a half in that condition when his mother arrived to pick him up for his 1 p.m. appointment. No one called her to tell her her boy had been brutalized. There was no word on where the 16-year-old was. The younger boy had “knots the size of a fist” all over his head. For all anyone knew, he could have been having a brain bleed for that hour and a half and could have been in grave condition by the time she arrived. As it was, she took him for medical help immediately. The report we’ve gotten is that he has a concussion and a broken jaw.
It’s kinda like that…only worse, in Hardin.
We’ve been able to reach Sheriff JT Fricker about the situation. He said his office was notified about reports of a beating, the notification coming from the grandfather and mother of the victim, coming to him after school was out today. The protocol, Sheriff Fricker says, with an incident such as this is that the school must contact the sheriff’s department, and that hadn’t happened as of end of school today. So Fricker says he plans on going to the school Monday and conducting interviews of the administration and of witnesses, and will relay any and all information/reports to the state’s attorney for further action.
But the bullying situation in Hardin County is, as this illustrates, largely out of control.
Last year we had the “kill list,” wherein a spat going on between teenage girls too big for their britches resulted in the expulsion of two of them, and subsequent joint Orders of Protection, which, we hear, are not being upheld (this according to a scathing letter to the editor in this month’s issue; you’ll have to get one, or sign on to the e-Edition, to read it). There have been other, non-stop bullying issues in Hardin, as there have been in neighboring Gallatin and Saline…and no one seems to want to do anything to stop it.
What could have been done last night, with the texts being sent like they were, is unknown. We don’t know what law enforcement officials took the complaint, but whomever it was, they didn’t relay it to the sheriff. But we do know that some authorities, particularly through the school system, seem content with just letting this stuff cycle on.
It will be interesting to see what Sheriff Fricker does on Monday. Check back between now and then to see if there are any updates.