DUBLIN — A group of masked men allegedly entered the Dublin High School campus on Friday, followed a 14-year-old freshman into the locker room and beat him bloody, causing a broken nose and a concussion, the boy’s mother told this news organization on Tuesday.
Students were just getting out of class and the campus was emptying except for a few student-athletes, coaches and administrators. The boy was standing outside the locker room about 3:30 p.m. Friday, picking up his football jersey and getting ready for practice, said his mother, Cherie Barfield.
Then he was suddenly attacked by a group of masked assailants led by the mother of a classmate who called out to identify Barfield’s son, she said. The mother was with her daughter, a freshman at Dublin High, Barfield said.
“When he looked up and looked at them, there were five men coming from both sides wearing ski masks and hoodies,” Barfield said. “The two friends he was with ran away and he immediately jumped up and went to the locker room because he thought he was safe.”
But the masked men followed the 14-year-old into the locker room and began beating him, Barfield said. He was thrown into the locker room, punched around and jumped by first one – and then all five – men, she said. The girl and her mother reportedly followed the attackers into the locker room and captured the attack on video.
The boy fought back but was eventually overpowered by the group and left bleeding on the ground, his mother said. The school district’s superintendent said a head coach and other students were nearby and stopped the attack. But Barfield claims no one stepped in to help her son.
Barfield was unaware of the attack until she heard from another parent whose child had seen the 14-year-old bleeding in the locker room. Barfield called 911 and rushed to the school to find her son.
She says a dispatcher told her that there were no police officers on campus because they had been called to an incident in another part of the city, and that no officers were immediately available to check on the 14-year-old.
When she arrived on campus to look for her son, she said she found him all alone on the locker room bench, bleeding from the attack, with no one to care for him. She said he had trouble speaking to paramedics when they arrived because his head was pounding from a concussion.
She claimed that no one from the school had contacted her about the attack on her son.
“I didn’t know if my son was still alive, I didn’t know anything at all,” Barfield said. “I didn’t know what had happened to him, to what extent.”
In a statement on Tuesday, Dublin Police Chief Nate Schmidt said the suspects had not yet been identified, but all were captured on school video surveillance. The suspects are believed to be between 16 and 19 years old, police said. The age of the parent is still unclear, and police have not yet made any arrests.
“It is not believed that this was a random incident, and school security continues to interview witnesses and collect video evidence to determine a motive and how the victim, suspect and parents at Dublin High School know each other,” Schmidt wrote in the press release.
The after-school incident outraged the school’s principal and forced the district to revise its policies on campus safety and student supervision.
Dublin Unified School District Superintendent Chris Funk said the principal and four assistant principals were all on campus at the time of the attack, which police said occurred around 3:30 p.m. According to the school’s schedule, the last bell on Fridays is at 2:20 p.m. Funk said the school’s administration is on campus daily until the school office closes at 4:30 p.m.
“The people who came to campus had been there before and obviously knew the campus and could go back to the guys’ locker room,” Funk said in an interview.
Funk said this incident “requires us to review our policies and procedures and make some adjustments.” He added that the school immediately made changes to protocols and now ensures that the school’s locker rooms remain locked at all times, especially after students have finished changing.
He said there was no campus police or student resource officer on campus at the time, as they are stationed at all area schools and move from campus to campus throughout the day. Even if an officer was on duty, he said, they would not typically be stationed outside the locker room at that time of day, but rather somewhere further forward in the school in an area with higher foot traffic.
“I don’t think an SRO (school resource officer) could have prevented this,” Funk said.
Funk added that the district is reviewing school supervision hours as well as locker room security during the school day and after school.
Barfield said her family plans to take legal action against the school and hire an attorney to handle the fallout from the attack on her son. She said she wants the young girl and mother who allegedly provoked her son and brought the attackers to campus banned from the school and expelled from the district.
Her son will not return to high school until it is safe, even if that means missing his first football game as a running back and linebacker for the Gaels, she said.
“There was no one there to do anything about it,” Barfield said. “There are no heroes in this story.”
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