DUBLIN — A group of masked males allegedly got onto the Dublin High School campus on Friday, followed a 14-year-old freshman into a locker room and beat him bloody, giving him a broken nose and concussion, the boy’s mother told this news organization on Tuesday.
Students were just getting out of class and the campus was emptying, save for some student athletes, coaches and administrators. The boy was outside the locker room at about 3:30 p.m. Friday picking up his football jersey and preparing for practice, his mother Cherie Barfield said.
Then suddenly, he was confronted by a group of masked assailants allegedly led by a classmate’s mother, who called out to try and identify Barfield’s son. The parent was with her daughter, a Dublin High freshman, Barfield said.
“When he looked up and looked at her, there were five men coming from either side of her with ski masks and hoodies on,” Barfield said. “The two friends he was with scattered and he immediately jumped up and went into the locker room, thinking he was safe.”
But the masked males followed the 14-year-old into the locker room, and started beating on him, Barfield said. He was thrown into the lockers, thrashed around and jumped at first by one, and then all five, of the males, she said. The girl and her mother allegedly followed the assailants into the locker room and captured the assault on video.
The boy fought back, but ultimately was overcome by the group and left bloodied on the ground, his mother said. The district’s superintendent said a head coach was nearby, along with other students, and they stopped the attack. But Barfield claims no one sprung into action to help her son.
Barfield was unaware of the attack until she heard word from another parent whose child saw the 14-year-old bleeding from the attack in the locker room. Barfield called 9-1-1 and rushed to the school to find her boy.
She says a dispatcher told her no police officer was on campus because they were dispatched to an incident in another part of the town, and that there was no authorities immediately available to check on the 14-year-old.
By the time she arrived on campus to find her son, she said she found him all alone on the locker room bench, bleeding and reeling from the attack with no one tending to him. She said he struggled to speak with paramedics when they arrived because his head was pounding from a concussion.
No one from the school contacted her about the attack on her son, she claimed.
“I didn’t know if my son was alive, I didn’t know anything,” Barfield said. “I didn’t know what happened to him, to what degree.”
In a statement on Tuesday, Dublin Police Chief Nate Schmidt said the suspects have not yet been identified, but were all caught on video surveillance at the school. The suspects are believed to be between 16 to 19 years old, police said. The age of the parent is still unclear, and police have made no arrests yet.
“It is not believed this was a random incident and School Resource Officers continue to interview witnesses and collect video evidence to determine a motive and how the victim, suspect, and Dublin High School parent know each other,” Schmidt wrote in the release.
The after-school incident outraged the school’s principal and has forced the district to review 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 during the time of the attack, which police said happened at about 3:30 p.m. The last bell on Fridays is at 2:20 p.m., according to the school’s bell schedule. Funk said administrators are on campus until the school office closes at 4:30 p.m. daily.
“The people that came on campus had been on the campus in the past and knew the campus, obviously, and were able to get back to the boys locker room,” Funk said in an interview.
Funk said this incident “requires us to look at our policies and procedures and make some adjustments.” He added that the school has made immediate changes to protocols, ensuring the school’s locker rooms are to be locked at all times, especially after students are done changing.
He said there was no campus police, or student resource officer, on campus at that time because they are stationed throughout all area schools and move from campus to campus throughout the day. Even if there was an officer on duty, he said, they normally would not be stationed in front of the locker room at that time of day, and instead would be somewhere toward the front of the school in a zone with higher foot traffic.
“I don’t think an SRO would have prevented that from happening,” Funk said.
Funk added that the district is reviewing the school’s time of supervision and the safety of the locker room throughout the day and after school.
Barfield said her family is taking legal action against the school and has hired an attorney to deal with the aftermath of the attack on her son. She said she wants the young girl and mother who allegedly antagonized her son and brought the men to the campus to be banned from the school and removed from the district.
Her son will not return to the 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.
“Nobody was there to do anything about it,” Barfield said. “There are no heroes in this story.”