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this.
people are just doing their job
BERLIN | Thu Nov 27, 2008 11:19am EST
(Reuters) - An eight-year-old German schoolboy who wanted to complain to his mother about being sent out of class took his teacher's car and crashed it, police said.
The boy, banished from class for disrupting a lesson, pinched the 40-year-old teacher's car key when she was not looking and managed to start up her compact car, accelerating and putting the vehicle into first gear.
"The little fellow drove for about 25 m (yards) before crashing into a Volvo, also parked in the car park outside the school," a police spokesman in the eastern German city of Zwickau said on Thursday.
The boy later told police he had wanted to drive home to his mother to complain about the teacher sending him out of class.
Police estimated he caused 8,000 euros ($10,340) of damage.
Six-year-old Michigan girl shot and killed in classroomBy David Walsh
1 March 2000
A six-year-old girl was shot and killed, apparently by a fellow first grade student, a six-year-old boy, in a classroom at Buell Elementary School in Mt. Morris Township, outside of Flint, Michigan. Flint is a center of General Motors' auto production empire, located sixty miles north of Detroit. The fatal shooting occurred Tuesday morning.
Whether the shooting was intentional or accidental is not known for certain. There are reports that the two children had a quarrel prior to the incident. Authorities identified the weapon as a .32 caliber handgun stolen in December.
According to one account, the shooting took place around 10 AM as students were filing out of a classroom. Allegedly, the boy pulled out the gun and fired one shot at the girl, hitting her in the neck. The boy reportedly then ran into a lavatory where he hid the gun in a trash can.
The girl, Kayla Rolland, was taken to Hurley Medical Center. She died at approximately 10:30 AM. School officials held the boy until police arrived. He is currently in the custody of the state child welfare agency, the so-called Family Independence Agency.
No sooner had the first news reports of the tragic incident emerged than the question was posed as to whether Genesee County authorities might prosecute the alleged “gunman.” As absurd as this might seem, there was good reason for the issue to be raised.
The shooting follows by a few months the conviction in nearby Pontiac of Nathaniel Abraham, who was only 11 at the time of his alleged crime. Abraham was the first youth to be charged with murder under a 1997 Michigan statute that allows children of any age to be prosecuted as adults for serious crimes. Oakland county authorities pursued the case against Abraham in order to establish a precedent and legitimize the 1997 law.
These officials and the Michigan state legislators who framed the law have, in essence, attempted to efface any legal or moral distinction between children and adults. According to this line of reasoning, human beings reach the “age of reason” in elementary school. Supporters of the law have made clear they would be prepared to prosecute children of kindergarten or first-grade age.
The first response of Genesee County Prosecutor Arthur A. Busch was to downplay the likelihood of bringing charges against the boy. “There is a presumption in law that a child ... is not criminally responsible and can't form an intent to kill,” Busch told reporters. “Obviously, he has done a very terrible thing, but legally, he can't be held criminally responsible.”
Whether Busch is more enlightened than Oakland County officials or has simply been chastened by the unfavorable publicity the Abraham case attracted is not clear. Nor can it be ruled out that he might come under pressure to change his mind. Nonetheless, it is telling that every television and print journalist felt obliged to discuss the possibility of charges being laid. That in itself reveals the barbaric state of the American justice system.
Whether the little boy is prosecuted or not, it is safe to assume that the authorities will turn the tragic death of Kayla Rolland into a pure police matter. Busch suggested that the individual responsible for allowing the gun to fall into the boy's hands might face charges.
Bill Clinton, fundraising in Florida, deplored the incident and noted, as he had in his State of the Union address, that the “accidental gun death rate of children in America is nine times higher than that in the other 25 biggest countries combined.” In the same speech Clinton sounded a familiar theme, insisting that Americans had never had it so good. “What are we to do with this enormous amount of prosperity...?” he asked.
These comments ignore an obvious point: if the population were universally enjoying prosperity and happiness, such incidents as the Mt. Morris shooting would either not occur, or they would merely be isolated episodes.
In fact, this latest tragedy is the most recent in a series of school shootings in the US. Since the mass killings at Columbine High School in Colorado last May, in which 14 students (including the two teenage gunmen) and a teacher were killed, there have been numerous other incidents: on May 20, 1999, a 15-year-old boy opened fire at a high school in Conyers, Ga., wounding six students; on November 19, a 13-year-old girl was fatally shot in the head in a school in Deming, New Mexico, allegedly killed by a 12-year-old boy; on December 6, a 13-year-old student fired at least 15 rounds at a middle school in Fort Gibson, Oklahoma, wounding four classmates.
The epidemic of shootings cannot simply be ascribed to individual weaknesses. The deep alienation felt by many of the younger generation, the debased social atmosphere in which backwardness and violence breed, the availability of fire-arms in massive numbers—these are symptoms of a crisis of American society for which the ruling elite has no solutions. Its only response is to lock more people up.
Kip Kinkel, the 17-year-old, who opened fire at a high school in Springfield, Oregon, has been sentenced to nearly 112 years in prison; Andrew Wurst, 15, responsible for the death of a teacher in Edinboro, Pennsylvania has been imprisoned for 30 to 60 years; a 14-year-old student pleaded guilty but mentally ill for a shooting in West Paducah, Kentucky and received a life sentence; Evan Ramsey, 16, who shot and killed a school principal and a fellow student in Bethel, Alaska, is serving a 210-year sentence.
HARTFORD - After a second-grader brought a pocketknife to school, a parent questions school officials' handling of communication about the incident.
"I didn't know anything about it until after school, when my son said the child told him he was going to cut him to pieces," said Jody Melton, whose son told her that he had been threatened by the child with the pocketknife. "The school never contacted me. I just know what my child said and that other children heard and saw the same thing."
A boy pulled out the pocketknife on the playground at Hartford Elementary School about lunchtime Monday. He showed the pocketknife to a group of other second-grade boys, with reports varying on whether the pocketknife was opened or closed.
No one was harmed in the incident, with Superintendent Rick Levek emphasizing that "no child was ever in any imminent danger."
Despite reassurances, Melton said parents felt distressed by the lack of communication and the conflicting reports between students and administrators.
"I don't like the way the school handled it," Melton said. "I feel like someone should have contacted me just to let me know something was going on. I think they should have made the initial phone call."
Melton said that by the time her son arrived home Monday, it was too late in the day to call school officials to ask questions.
"To hear this kind of thing from my son scared me," she said. "And the more he talks about it, he's just getting more nervous."
Melton also objected to the children being questioned multiple times without parents being notified.
"I think parents should have been allowed to be there when their children were questioned," Melton said. "They're only second-graders, and it's scary for them, even if they're not in trouble."
Similarly, she said she shouldn't have had the responsibility of calling the school for information, believing instead that contacting parents is the school's duty.
Melton said she had spoken with both Levek and Principal Michelle Lee, who reassured her that the child who had the knife was being disciplined appropriately.
Levek said he was happy with how school officials handled the situation through their prompt response.
"We wanted to deal with the situation first and get all our facts straight," Levek said.
"Sometimes, situations like this just take time, and we wanted to get our ducks all in a row," he explained. "Maybe we should have called everyone right away, but we wanted to get the story fresh from the kids before they went home."
The first thing administrators did, he said, was to interview the child who brought the pocketknife to school, his parents and then the other children.
"We found no evidence that the pocketknife had ever been opened," he said. "The story has changed since the incident happened, and all we can do is go by what the kids told us the day it happened."
Levek said he was grateful that the students involved in the incident came forward to tell the playground monitors what had happened.
"This is a pretty big thing, and we're pretty proud of them," he said. "I'm not saying that we're perfect, but I think we did a nice job of getting to the bottom of the situation.
"We're not hiding anything," he said.
Levek emphasized that the child had been disciplined appropriately and seriously, but he noted that he was unable to comment on the exact nature of the decision.
"My issue isn't with how they are punishing the child; it's that I would have liked to have had a heads-up," Melton said. "I would like to have been better prepared to talk to my child when he got home, because what he said really threw me."
The land of the Free?
Free, to touch little girls.
you americans are really scared of terrorists eh? how many terror attacked have their been in the last 50 yrs? divide that number by ho wmany planes take off each day in teh US. think about that, and then tell me its a good thing this happened. touching little girls doesn't stop terrorists...
