A video that has been circulated widely on social media platforms over the past week appears to show a white student bullying a student of minority descent, ending with the white student standing over the seated minority student and appearing to put him in a chokehold.
Dr. Brad Hunt (photo), the Superintendent of the Coppell, Texas Independent School District is now under fire after public outrage over how the incident was handled. The white student who appears to be the aggressor was suspended for one day, the apparent victim for three days, his mother says. It is not known what led to the altercation. Because both students are minors NCRM is not using the names of the students in our report.
The Dallas Morning News points to a “petition circulated online by Sonika Kukreja, who is the sitting student’s mother.” She has “called on the district to remove the other student from her son’s classes immediately.”
That Change.org petition has nearly a quarter of a million signatures. It says in part that the “aggressor in the video is on the wrestling team and can be seen carrying out a very dangerous carotid restraint on [the other student’s] neck. This technique restricts blood flow to a person’s brain by compressing the sides of the neck where the carotid arteries are located. {The victim] appears to briefly lose consciousness at the end of the neck choke maneuver.”
“It was horrible. I couldn’t sleep for three nights straight,” Sonika Kukreja told KXAS-TV (NBC5), after watching the video. “I felt like I was being choked. I cried many times watching it.”
Dr. Brad Hunt, the superintendent, said in a public statement to parents: “Bullying, both verbal and physical, as well as physical acts of aggression are never acceptable and do not align with who we are at CISD and our core values.”
But Dr. Hunt also calls it a “physical altercation between two students.”
Some on social media have claimed the white student’s father ran for the school board, has connections, and local law enforcement is refusing to issue a police report.
It does not appear that any school official stopped what appeared to be a physical assault.
The school district first made its Twitter account private after this tweet (below) was posted, then appears to have deleted the account altogether. Its Facebook account appears to be shuttered currently.
This is the video that was posted multiple times: