Saturday, March 10, 2018

Another School Stabbing

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.
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Z’Inah BrownWestchester County District Attorney's Office
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.
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A police officer outside New Rochelle High SchoolDavid McGlynn
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.’’
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Maryann Coyle outside Dunkin’ Donuts where high school student Valeree Schwab was stabbed to deathDavid McGlynn
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.
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A memorial for Valeree Schwab outside the Dunkin’ Donuts where she was stabbedDavid McGlynn
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.”
FILED UNDER       

Guess We Should Seize All Knives Now

Man faces up to 60 years in prison for high school stabbing when he was teen

Teen suspect: I have more people to kill
 
Teen suspect: I have more people to kill 00:37

Story highlights

  • A 16-year-old stabbed 21 people at a suburban Pittsburgh high school in 2014
  • Hribal faces 23.5 to 60 years in prison, charged as an adult
(CNN)A Pittsburgh man who went on a stabbing spree at his high school when he was a teenager was sentenced to a maximum of 60 years in prison Monday.
Alex Hribal, now 20, was 16 when he stabbed 20 students and 1 security guard in the hallway early on the morning of April 9, 2014.
All 21 victims survived, though some were in critical condition and underwent surgeries as a result of the attack.
    Hribal, charged as an adult, faces 23.5 to 60 years in state prison, according to the Westmoreland County District Attorney's office.
    Hribal pleaded guilty in October 2017 to 21 counts of attempted homicide, in addition to 21 counts of aggravated assault and having a weapon on school property, according to court documents.
    Though the case never went to trial, during litigation the judge denied a defense motion arguing that Hribal be charged as a juvenile, according to court documents.
    Hribal's defense attorney Patrick Thomassey, citing severe mental illness, also argued that the juvenile be allowed to plead "guilty but mentally ill," but the judge denied that motion as well.
    Hribal would have been allowed psychological treatment before serving his prison sentence had that motion been granted. Instead he will go directly to prison to begin his sentence.
    The judge ordered Hribal to pay hundreds of thousands in restitution to the victims, but Hribal's parents aren't responsible for payment and Hribal will not have a means of income in the foreseeable future, according to his attorney.
    Thomassey said he's disappointed with the sentencing, calling it excessive.
    "I think this kid is severely mentally ill, but there were politics in this situation that I couldn't get around."

    What happened in the hallway

    Early in the morning of April 9, 2014, Hribal began the stabbing spree, using a pair of 8-inch kitchen knives to slash those in his path.
    The Franklin Regional Senior High School assistant principal tackled Hribal to the ground to end five gory, terrifying minutes inside his school, Murrysville, Pennsylvania, police Chief Thomas Seefeld said in a press conference after the incident.
    Hribal refused to drop the knives even when he was tackled. "My work is not done, I have more people to kill," Hribal said, according to the criminal complaint.
    Authorities looking through his locker found "a document" -- dated April 6, three days before the mass stabbing -- signaling Hribal's intentions to kill, according to the criminal complaint.
    One part of it read: "I can't wait to see the priceless and helpless looks on the faces of the students of one of the 'best schools in Pennsylvania' realize their previous lives are going to be taken by the only one among them that isn't a plebeian."
    His parents and classmates insisted afterward that they didn't see the horror coming. Thomassey, his lawyer, described him as a well-liked and "typical young kid" who had "never been in trouble."
    Clarification: This story and the headline have been updated to clarify Alex Hribal's current age. He was a teen at the time of his arrest.

    There Are Risks But Nothing Good Happens Without Risk

    In Shock Move, Trump Prepares To Meet With Kim Jong Un. Is That Great, Or A Terrible Idea?

     Impersonators of Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un pose during the Opening Ceremony of the PyeongChang 2018 Winter Olympic Games at PyeongChang Olympic Stadium on February 9, 2018 in Pyeongchang-gun, South Korea.
    Ryan Pierse / Staff / Getty Images
    On Thursday evening, the White House surprised the media by announcing that President Trump would plan a meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. The media have been confused by the announcement — they were big backers of President Obama’s commitment to meet with enemies of the United States without preconditions, and so they feel the need to cheer Trump here, too. The Associated Press called it a “bold, audacious and potentially groundbreaking gambit by both leaders.”
    On the Right, ambivalence reigned. The Right despised Obama’s open-door policy with regard to dictators, and said that Obama’s willingness to legitimize them would lead to added strength for the world’s worst leaders. Now, they’re confused by Trump: is this Reagan bullying Gorbachev, or is this Obama surrendering to the mullahs?
    So, here are the arguments for both sides.
    Trump Could Break The Impasse. The argument here is that all talks thus far have failed, from Madeleine Albright to Jimmy Carter, and that only a presidential meeting can push Kim to back away from his nuclear program. Sarah Huckabee Sanders cast the meeting as part of Trump’s “maximum pressure campaign” against Kim. Kim has supposedly opened up the possibility of denuclearization of the Korean peninsula in return for American guarantees to leave him in power.
    Trump Could Get Played By Kim. Kim wants to be seen as a respected world leader. A meeting with Trump could certainly achieve that. And while Kim may have talked about denuclearization, that’s highly unlikely — the stated policy of the Kim regime has always been removal of American troops from the Korean peninsula, and Kim may demand that concession in return for supposed denuclearization. In realpolitik terms, Kim would be a fool to give up his only guarantor of security: nuclear weapons. And Trump presumably isn’t going to start removing troops anytime soon — although Thomas Wright at The Atlantic makes the case that Trump could fall into that trap.
    There’s also the issue of South Korea. The current South Korean administration is a so-called “sunlight” administration, committed to appeasement of the North Koreans. It was President Moon Jae-in who conveyed Kim’s supposed offer to the Americans. Moon’s office proclaimed that North Korea has “ample intentions of holding talks with the United States”; Moon isn’t closed to the idea of removing American assets from South Korea. That means that the United States must be wary of being undercut by the South Koreans as well.
    Then there’s the problem of what happens if the meeting accomplishes nothing. Trump will have a stake in proclaiming that North Korea has moderated its stance, even if they haven’t — just as Obama and his acolytes claimed that Iran was a moderate state, even as they empowered the greatest terror sponsor on the planet.
    So, this all comes down to Trump’s fabled negotiation skills. The most likely outcome here is an empty promise by Kim to scale back his nuclear program in return for promises from the US to back off their threats, as well as cash from the world for “humanitarian” purposes. That isn’t a win. It’s just kicking the can down the road. But perhaps Trump will surprise the world again. It’s become his M.O., after all.

    Ignoring Crimes Lead To Parkland Shooting. Thanks Obama!

    REPORT: Broward County Schools Embraced Obama Policy To Avoid Arresting Criminal Students, Allowing Parkland Shooter To Slip Through Cracks

    People are brought out of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School after a shooting at the school that reportedly killed and injured multiple people on February 14, 2018 in Parkland, Florida. Numerous law enforcement officials continue to investigate the
    Joe Raedle/Getty Images
    According to Paul Sperry of RealClearInvestigations.com, the Parkland, Florida school shooter was able to escape scrutiny despite dozens of red flags, including dozens of reports to police and at least two reports to the FBI, thanks to Obama administration policy dedicated to preventing the arrest of troubled students. Sperry writes:
    Documents reviewed by RealClearInvestigations and interviews show that his school district in Florida’s Broward County was in the vanguard of a strategy, adopted by more than 50 other major school districts nationwide, allowing thousands of troubled, often violent, students to commit crimes without legal consequence. The aim was to slow the "school-to-prison pipeline."
    Sperry says that in 2013, the Broward County schools, at the behest of the Obama administration efforts to prevent too many students of color from ending up in jail for crimes committed on campus, had rewritten its disciplinary policies to make it nearly impossible to suspend, expel, or arrest students for behavioral problems including criminal activity.
    Sperry reports:
    Broward school Superintendent Robert W. Runcie – a Chicagoan and Harvard graduate with close ties to President Obama and his Education Department – signed an agreement with the county sheriff and other local jurisdictions to trade cops for counseling. Students charged with various misdemeanors, including assault, would now be disciplined through participation in “healing circles,” obstacle courses and other “self-esteem building” exercises. Asserting that minority students, in particular, were treated unfairly by traditional approaches to school discipline, Runcie’s goal was to slash arrests and ensure that students, no matter how delinquent, graduated without criminal records.
    One of the lead advocates for this program was Sheriff Scott Israel, the overt leftist who has shied away from responsibility and sought instead to blame the National Rifle Association. In November 2013, he reportedly signed an agreement that spelled out 13 crimes that could no longer be reported to the police. Sperry continues:
    In just a few years, ethnically diverse Broward went from leading the state of Florida in student arrests to boasting one of its lowest school-related incarceration rates. Out-of-school suspensions and expulsions also plummeted. … The core of the approach is a program called PROMISE (Preventing Recidivism through Opportunities, Mentoring, Interventions, Support & Education), which substitutes counseling for criminal detention for students who break the law.
    The Sheriff’s Office is a partner in PROMISE.
    Without an arrest record, the shooter could buy weapons. Without an arrest record, the police could not corroborate tips with past arrests or use those past arrests as the basis for parole violation, for example.
    Sperry’s expose is devastating, and shows once again that ignoring crime does not make it go away — it just diffuses it, allowing it to metastasize.

    A Good First Step

    BREAKING: Mississippi passes law banning abortion at 15 weeks

    Today, on March 8, 2018, the Mississippi House passed a law banning the majority of abortions after 15 weeks. The vote was 75-34. Governor Phil Bryant has promised to sign the law, stating, “As I have repeatedly said, I want Mississippi to be the safest place in America for an unborn child. House Bill 1510 will help us achieve that goal.”
    Mississippi lawmakers are well aware of the abortion industry’s threats on this bill and expect the law to be a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade. Specifically, the Mississippi law would challenge the viability standard set out in Roe and detailed in Planned Parenthood v. CaseyThe viability standard has proven unworkable in multiple ways, but this new law could challenge how the viability standard forces states to allow abortion on demand until late in pregnancy — when the smallest percentage of abortions are sought.
    Diane Derzis, the owner of Mississippi’s one remaining abortion facility, acknowledged that Roe v. Wade is on a clear path to being overturned: “Roe is clearly in danger and that’s what they’re preparing for.” She plans to sue the state if Gov. Bryant signs the bill.
    State lawmakers described the law as one that would help in “protecting more women” and “protecting more children.” They spoke of the humanity of the child in the womb which, while present from the moment of conception, is very evident by 15 weeks.
    The Endowment for Human Development, a “nonprofit organization dedicated to improving health science education and public health” has partnered with National Geographic to illustrate the development of the child in the womb through modern technology and real-time videos and photos of preborn children. These photos, videos, and more information about fetal development at all stages is available here.
    The vote in the House closely followed Tuesday’s vote in the Mississippi Senate, where senators voted to approve the 15-week ban, 35-14.
    While other states have passed early abortion bans, if Gov. Bryant signs this law, Mississippi will hold the earliest ban in the nation, as courts have struck down the bans passed in Arkansas and North Dakota.