Published on Oct 4, 2012
A surveillance camera captured a disturbing and violent school beating at a middle school in Indiana. Now, the teenager and his parents are suing the school district because they say it isn’t doing enough to prevent instances of bullying.
In the video, 13-year-old Austin McDaniel is put into a choke hold and slammed to the ground by a 15-year-old student. The bully then proceeded to punch McDaniel incessantly, delivering dozens of blows until his victim is beaten unconscious.
Students can be seen all around watching the incident, however, no one steps in to help McDaniel — they just watch.
“It makes you sick to your stomach really,” McDaniel told WUFX.
The teen’s mother said they were very close to offices and classrooms but no teachers or staff members at Benjamin Rush Middle School came to help. She is also furious about how the school responded once they were made aware of the beating.
“My son sat at the school with a head concussion and other injuries for an hour and twelve minutes before they called,” she said.
The mother also said the school swept the incident under the rug and failed to inform parents about the attack or address it with students.
To make matters worse, McDaniel’s friend Logan got beat up just 11 days later, leaving both students afraid of when the next attack will come.
“This is a complete lack of supervision. This is a complete lack of watching what is going on in front of you. It’s just every parent’s worst nightmare,” another unidentified parent says.
A lawsuit is being filed by both teens and their parents against the Rush County school district in hopes it will do more to address bullying in the future
This is shocking, but I’m glad it’s on video for all to see…es. the schools cover-up, the students lack of helping the victim and no one went to get help. Interesting that it happened at Benjamin Rush Middle School. Isn’t Rush referred t as the Father of American Psychiatry? Wasn’t he the one who knew that chains and dungeons were not the answer for the “mentally ill” and put them in regular hospital settings? That school needs to make some points about their historical name-sake, and practice compassion-empathy and ACTION
Yes, Rush is known as the Father of American Psychiatry, but his parenting skills could have used some improvements.
“Benjamin Rush, a physician who has been referred to as “the father of modern psychiatry” largely due to his book, Medical Inquiries and Observations on the Diseases of the Mind, worked at the hospital. He believed in treating mentally ill patients with bloodletting, a treatment that was used by Ancient civilizations. He dismissed demonic theories behind mental illness, and instead thought that psychiatric disorders originated from “hypertension in the brain’s blood vessels” (as cited in Goodwin, 1999).
It was thought that removing blood from the body would help to ease the tension. Patients would indeed typically calm down after a bloodletting, but that was mainly because they were just too weak.
Today, such treatments seem incredibly cruel. But during earlier times, professionals genuinely believed that they were helping patients.”