Fatal high school stabbing leaves Westchester enclave shaken to its core
In the final moments of her life, 16-year-old Valaree Schwab was just trying to get back her house keys.
The New Rochelle High School junior had slipped out for lunch at around noon on Jan. 10 despite a policy against leaving campus at the award-winning school.
She was soon knocked to the ground and robbed at a nearby McDonald’s by a gang of school bullies. Then her teenage tormentors — who harassed her on a daily basis about her tattoos, love for the band Nirvana and affinity for social activism — proceeded to stalk her for the next hour.
They followed her into a Subway sandwich shop and then a Dunkin’ Donuts — where she would spend her last conscious seconds gasping for air, clutching the hand of a young cashier as blood poured from two stab wounds to her heart and lungs.
“She didn’t even know she was stabbed,” the worker recalled to The Post.
“She was screaming, saying that somebody stole her keys . . . The next thing you know, you see a commotion, and then everybody’s gone, and then [she was] just standing by herself, bleeding.”
The green-eyed teen flatlined once in the ambulance, again at the hospital and a final time at around 4 p.m., just after her school’s eighth period would have ended.
“She was bullied, stalked, assaulted, robbed and ultimately stabbed and murdered by her own classmates,” said Valaree’s aunt, Monica Furrelle Schwab.
“There aren’t too many words to express how we feel.”
Over the next eight days, two more New Rochelle High students were assaulted in another possible bullying case.
Parents, teachers and students in the well-off, leafy Westchester County enclave appeared baffled over how the spate of violence could have happened in their typically peaceful town, where the most they usually had to worry about was the occasional schoolyard scuffle.
Pizzeria owner Michael Napolitano, 45, whose shop was the scene of the second violent incident, said that in the two and a half decades that he has owned local businesses, he has never seen anything like it.
“It’s a good community, it’s a good school,’’ Napolitano said of New Rochelle High, whose grads include “60 Minutes’’ founder Don Hewitt, TV journalist Andrea Mitchell and “Shaft’’ movie star Richard Roundtree.
“Great kids come out of [the school]. It’s sad. It’s gotta get better.”
Behavioral experts aren’t sure how fast change can come.
“It’s everywhere — it’s everywhere,” Andrea Altshuler, a clinical social worker specializing in adolescents, said of bullying.
“I think that growing up now is so different than anything we experienced,’’ she told The Post. “There are so many more different avenues for bullying than there ever has been in history.
“Kids getting exposed to such a windfall of information that they don’t understand creates pent-up anxiety, pent-up anger, pent-up emotion that manifests itself in impulsive activity in adolescents.
“Maybe in some level that’s what’s happening at New Rochelle.”
Police say 16-year-old New Rochelle student Z’Inah Brown was among Valaree’s five or six tormentors that violent day — and allegedly killed the teen with a steak knife after she dared to fight back with pepper spray.
On a sunny Friday morning soon after Valaree’s death, Maryann Coyle, 54, and her daughter Melissa, 18, went to the Dunkin’ Donuts where Schwab was killed.
“We feel jittery even coming in here after that,” Maryann said, holding a bag of doughnuts and orange juice.
While a makeshift memorial to Valaree, replete with stuffed animals, drawings and handwritten notes, had been growing outside the North Avenue Dunkin’ Donuts, violence involving students at the school has only been intensifying.
A week after Valaree’s death, a 15-year-old student was followed to Gemelli’s Pizzeria, on North Avenue, and jumped by a group of older teens while trying to order a slice. Some said the attack was a form of bullying.
Police said six or seven young men between the ages of 16 and 17 swarmed the victim — who admittedly had been violent when younger — throwing chairs and bottles at him. Police said the victim grabbed a few wine bottles to defend himself and chased the boys out of the restaurant.
“I ran up there, and it was just a mess,’’ shop owner Napolitano told The Post.
“A bunch of broken bottles of wine all over the place, blood, some tables were broken, food on the floor.”
The next day, the boy who was attacked came to school allegedly ready for battle.
At around 8:50 a.m., in a classroom right before third period, he plunged a weapon into the torso of a 16-year-old boy, leaving the stabbed teen with a punctured lung and lacerated spleen. The 15-year-old attacker then fled and is still at large.
The community, already fractured by Valaree’s death, reeled.
Parents flocked to the campus. Teachers locked their doors. Frantic texts were exchanged. How could this happen again?
Erica Martinez, whose 15-year-old son, Gianni, was close friends with Valaree, said her boy was scared to say goodbye to her before heading off to school the morning after the third attack.
“He said, ‘Well, Mom, I hope I don’t get stabbed today,’ ” Martinez, 47, recalled.
Gianni told The Post that after the third violent incident, “Everybody was panicking.
“Like, who’s next? What’s going to happen?” he said.
Maryann Coyle, the mom at Dunkin’, said she takes students to the high school every morning as part of a car pool, and “I had one [student] this morning, she didn’t want to go to school today because she’s scared.’’
The recent statistics on bullying are sobering.
According to StopBullying.gov, nearly a quarter of US students in grades 6 through 12 have experienced bullying, and more than 70 percent have witnessed it firsthand in school.
Last September, Bronx teen Abel Cedeno allegedly plunged a switchblade into two students who had been throwing pencils at him and calling him names, killing one of them.
Cedeno, 18, later told The Post in a jailhouse interview that he “just snapped.” He said he had suffered from bullying since the sixth grade for being bisexual and dressing differently.
Dr. Jennifer Powell-Lunder, a Westchester therapist and adjunct professor at Pace University for graduate psychology students, said, “Why are responses so violent these days?
“Some research has told us the threshold for shock has really gone down because kids today are so much more exposed to violence with social media and the internet.
“So they’re not understanding the severity of their responses and just how scary and violent they are.”
Altshuler, the Westchester social worker, said some parents are little help.
“Adults now don’t understand what kids have to deal with because we didn’t experience it with all the technology and how kids can never turn off,’’ she said.
“There’s no time for kids to just . . . be home with their family alone, relax their brain and just be — because there’s always the pressure of social media.’’
Alana Millings, a therapist who works behind the Dunkin’ Donuts where Valaree was murdered, said, “I don’t know what it all means, but I do know that these are not isolated [bullying] incidents.
“Obviously, at the level of murdering someone, that doesn’t happen every day. But certainly the amount of bullying that goes on between students seems pretty unfortunately par for the course.’’
“People bully for so many different reasons,’’ she said. “But most the time it’s because they themselves have been bullied.
“So it’s really just an ongoing cycle of victims turning into bullies and then more victims turning into bullies.”
School officials in New Rochelle say they are taking steps to try to curb bullying in the wake of the recent violence.
For example, New Rochelle Schools Superintendent Brian Osborne said at a recent public meeting that the high school’s policy of “closed lunch’’ — meaning students can’t leave the building — needs to be better regulated.
Random bag searches also will be conducted for weapons, and an independent “top-to-bottom” audit on school safety and security across the district is underway, he said.
In addition, the district plans to create an app so students can anonymously report bullying or even brewing tensions between kids, in the hopes that adults can intervene before violence occurs.
Parents at the school say reforms are badly needed.
José Colon, 43, said he had to pull his ninth-grade stepdaughter, Angelina Valentine, 14, out of school earlier this month because a group of girls said she was going to get jumped and beat up.
“Stuff like this shouldn’t be happening in school . . .we’re not going to allow that to happen to her,’’ Colon told The Post.
Manuel Lopez, whose 11th-grade daughter was friends with Valaree, said his child has been getting bullied repeatedly since the sixth grade.
“It affects the whole family,’’ he said, his eyes starting to fill with tears.
“My daughter is not an aggressive person. I’m constantly checking on her. I text her, ‘Are you OK? Is everything alright? Are you on the bus? Are you coming over? How’s your day? Are you all right?’ ”
Lopez said he gave his daughter pepper spray in case anyone tries to hurt her.
But, “Look what happened to Valaree. Valaree tried to defend herself with pepper spray . . . and they nailed her,” he said.
“You know I cried for that child. It broke my heart . . . She was just somebody’s baby.”
Valaree’s aunt Monica Schwab said she hopes the school’s efforts aren’t too little, too late.
“[Valaree] had written statements saying she needed help, she hated to come [to school], she didn’t want to be here,” Monica said.
“Let’s make sure no one else has to experience that.”
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