One of the juniors and two witnesses told police they were subjected to similar bullying when they were freshmen.
But both Huber Heights City Schools Superintendent Bill Kirby and Wayne Principal Reva Cosby said their internal investigation into the incident found no evidence that hazing or bullying was endemic in the high school.
The 14-year-old victim’s parents told the Dayton Daily News that school staff should have known this was going on and should have done more to prevent it from happening.
Kirby said their investigation determined that some students occasionally took part in unacceptable horseplay, including one activity students called “gooching” in which they would inappropriately touch students’ backsides by sliding their fingers down the students’ pants. “We have taken measures to inform our students that it is an inappropriate behavior,” he said.
How it started
On Nov. 15, the victim, a freshman who planned to try out for Wayne’s baseball team, told police he was spotting another student while training when the weights slipped and fell, and a 17-year-old upperclassman admonished the freshman for his mistake.
In response, the freshman told the older student not to talk to him like that, leading several older students to warn the freshman that he was wrong to talk back to upperclassmen.
On Nov. 22, the upperclassman who admonished the freshman and another 17-year-old student grabbed the victim as he stood in the hallway outside the gym, forced him into a corner and at least one student sexually violated him, according to police.
At least one other 17-year-old student witnessed the event, laughed and jumped up and down in amusement, according to the police officer who reviewed the school’s surveillance footage of the incident.
Later that night, the freshman’s father said he noticed his son was upset, and after confronting him, he learned about the assault. The family met with school officials and notified police.
Charges of first-degree rape by force were originally considered against the two juniors. But on Feb. 1, the teens pleaded guilty to lesser offenses in Juvenile Court, according to prosecutor’s spokesman Greg Flanagan.
Flanagan said one of the teens pleaded guilty to second-degree felony assault and received a suspended jail sentence at a youth services facility. The other teen pleaded guilty to first-degree misdemeanor assault and received probation. They both spent 10 days in juvenile detention and were forbidden from being members of the Wayne baseball team. The district also suspended the pair from school for 10 days, Kirby said.
The students who witnessed the attack were briefly suspended, but they were not forbidden from playing baseball, according to the victim’s parents. Superintendent Kirby said it is inappropriate to discuss the students’ disciplinary action.
In interviews with police, one of the culprits and two witnesses said similar kinds of harassment happened to them when they were freshmen.
“(The witness) said that when he was a freshman he was not allowed to speak to the upperclassmen and that freshmen should be seen and not heard,” the report states. “(He) said that when he was a freshman the same type of things happened to him.”
A pattern in school?
Principal Cosby said the baseball coaches told her they were unaware of any student who claimed to be a victim of initiation, hazing or bullying.
Cosby said the students involved in this case may have claimed similar types of bullying behavior happened to them when they were freshmen to minimize the severity of their actions or possibly justify them.
“The coaches said they are not aware that initiations are taking place, and in fairness to the coaches, I don’t know how much of that was these boys trying to minimize what happened,” she said. “That’s what they said after being caught.”
Still, Cosby said the district is proceeding on the assumption the claims are true and school employees are making a point of discussing bullying and hazing at length with students and what they should do to report such activities to officials.
But Nick Gounaris, the attorney for the teen convicted of felony assault, said his client and other students claim hazing has been part of an ongoing ritual at Wayne in some sports. He disputes that his client did anything more than hazing.
“At the school level, it is clear this is an issue that has gone on for a number of years,” Gounaris said. “From the folks we spoke with, this is something that is in their memory from the time they were underclassmen up to when they were upperclassmen.”
Jay Minton, Wayne’s athletic director, said the district has arranged for a guest speaker to visit the school on April 11 to share his experience about the dangers of bullying and the pain it can cause. Minton said he believes education is the key to curtailing problem behaviors such as horseplay, which often gives rise to more damaging actions.
“We are attacking this head-on,” he said. “Horseplay and roughhousing — there’s just no place for it anymore, because something negative will come out of it.”
The parents respond
But the victim’s parents said the district should have done a better job of cracking down on bullying before their son was attacked.
The parents said they believe the students involved are “good kids who made a bad decision,” but noted that bullying was clearly taking place at Wayne, and it is ultimately the district’s responsibility to be aware of it and stop it.
“If this problem doesn’t get straightened out now it’ll keep going and going, and no other kid will come forward because they don’t want the embarrassment,” the father said.
The couple also said the school district mishandled the punishment of the students who watched the attack in amusement. They said they should have all been prohibited from playing baseball.
The parents said their son has become a social outcast in Wayne because he reported the abuse. The parents said even they have been mocked by other parents.
Greg Ramey, a pediatric psychologist with the Children’s Medical Center of Dayton, said many victims of bullying do not report the harassment because they are humiliated by the experience and lack confidence that adults will be able to help.
Ramey said this means teachers, school officials and adults must do a better job at identifying signs of bullying and adopting strict policies to address it.
“A lot of bullying is being discounted by well-meaning teachers who don’t recognize the significant impact bullying has,” he said.
But some anti-bullying advocates said bullies know better than to harass other students in the presence of teachers and school officials, so the best way to combat the activity is by enlisting “bystanders” — the students who witness the event — to express disapproval of the behavior and report it to authorities.
“If you remove that audience, or remove the support of the audience, there is much less support for that to go on,” said Sarah Wallis, director of education programs with the Ohio Dispute Resolution and Conflict Management.
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