Man stabs, kills 10-year-old boy in revenge

A recent case in which a father stabbed a 10-year-old boy to death at school in Zhejiang province has stirred heated debate about administrators’ roles in the prevention of bullying on campus.

The father, 36-year-old Lin, stabbed the boy, surnamed Ye, who is a classmate of Lin’s daughter, with a knife at Longshan Experimental Primary School in Ruian, Wenzhou, on Friday.

The boy was rushed to the hospital but died from his wounds, according to the local police.

Police said the assailant, Lin, was detained and admitted seeking to retaliate against the boy, who he said had struck his daughter in the eyes during an English class two days earlier. The girl was in pain but did not see a doctor because the injury seemed minor.

The local newspaper, Ruian Daily, reported that the teacher rebuked the boy in class, but for unknown reasons the boy didn’t make a public apology to the girl as her parents had demanded. The teacher said the girl was not struck deliberately.

The Ruian Education Bureau convened an emergency meeting on Sunday, calling on all primary schools and kindergartens in the city to enhance security and safety measures by conducting regular patrols of their campuses. It also arranged counseling services for the students in the class, as well as for the relatives of the dead boy.

Prosecutors in Ruian are investigating the case.

“I think the school should bear responsibility for negligence in campus safety supervision, and the teacher in the class should provide appropriate solutions to play down such a minor collision before it escalates into a tragedy,” said Zheng Jianjuan, the mother of a 10-year-old boy in Zhejiang’s capital, Hangzhou.

However, Gong Yaodong, the father of a student at a foreign language school in the province, said the teacher handled the issue and tried to solve the classroom conflict in a proper way.

“It is Lin’s psychological distortion that caused the tragedy — taking extreme action against the 10-year-old boy,” he said.

Online rumors related to the case have surfaced. A 29-year-old blogger from Ruian, surnamed Wang, was given five days of administrative detention for disturbing social order after spreading rumors on WeChat, news portal zjol.com.cn reported.

According to local police, Wang fabricated rumors claiming that Lin, the suspect, had killed a person before but was later released for psychiatric reasons.