HS ‘deserted’ bullied teen
DOE ‘failed to protect’ beaten girl
A Manhattan high schooler was bullied and beaten up by two other students — including one brandishing a Taser — and the administration failed to act despite being aware of prior threats, a new lawsuit alleges.
Jihya Brown, 15, and her grandmother Denise Tucker filed suit against the city Department of Education last week over the May 26 incident that left the then-10th grader with a “fractured nose, bruising and swelling of her face [and] hair loss,” according to the court papers.
The teen and her grandmother claim officials at Urban Assembly Academy of Government and Law on the Lower East Side failed to act after Jihya was first threatened with a Taser by the student who later attacked her.
“If someone would have taken it seriously the first time this wouldn’t have happened to my granddaughter,” Tucker told The Post. “No one did anything.”
Jihya says a ninth-grader at the school — identified in court papers as ZNL — threatened her with a Taser for the first time on March 3 after the pair bumped into each other in the hallway.
“It started off with her bumping me and then screaming in the hallway saying I bumped her,” the teen told The Post. “She waved the Taser and attempted to tase me with it.”
Jihya alerted the principal — but the school failed to report the scary incident to police, intervene or punish the student in any way, according to the Manhattan Supreme Court lawsuit filed Wednesday.
Then, on May 26, Jihya says the same student threatened her again while she was sitting in class.
The teen says she reported the threats and how she felt unsafe to her school counselor, but was told, “Don’t worry about it.”
“She swept it under the rug,” Jihya said of the counselor.
According to the suit, ZNL and a friend of ZNL — ID’d in court papers as NG — attacked Jihya after school that day, repeatedly punching her in the face, pulling out her hair and dragging her on the ground. It took the teen more than six weeks to recover, she said.
Afterward, the school merely warned the assailants there would be consequences if such behavior happened again, Jihya said.
Jihya’s suit seeks unspecified damages from the DOE and the two students.
“They are fostering criminals by not calling the police when incidents like this occur,” Jihya’s lawyer Michael H. Joseph said of the school.
The DOE said it will review the suit. The city Law Department said it will respond in the litigation.
reporting by Cayla