Bronx School Assault Knife Stabbing Leaves One Dumb Thug Black Student Dead and Another Wounded

[David Fritz]

A 15-year-old was fatally stabbed and a 16-year-old was critically wounded
in their Bronx high school on Wednesday morning in what the police say was
apparently the culmination of weeks of conflict.

The killing, the first inside a city school building in more than two
decades, according to the mayor, set off a lockdown that left hundreds of
children cowering in their classrooms, the older ones frantically texting
parents for help. As word of the killing spread, parents desperate to see
their children descended on the building, which houses two schools — the
elementary school P.S. 67 and the Urban Assembly School for Wildlife
Conservation, serving students in grades 6 to 12.

The two who were stabbed were students in the Wildlife Conservation
school. The police said that Abel Cedeno, another student at the school,
was taken into custody and was charged late Wednesday with murder and
attempted murder.

The chief of detectives, Robert K. Boyce, said Mr. Cedeno, 18, had handed
a switchblade to a school counselor after the stabbing before heading to
an administrator’s office, where he waited for the police to arrive.

The boy who died, Matthew McCree, was stabbed in the chest, according to
the police. He was taken to St. Barnabas Hospital, where he was pronounced
dead. The other victim was stabbed in the arm and the torso, and was in
critical but stable condition. The other victim’s name had not been
released.

In an interview, Kevin Sampson, a dean at school, said the fatal
confrontation stemmed from “bullying,” and at a news conference on
Wednesday afternoon Chief Boyce said it appeared the three students had
been locked in a running dispute over the first weeks of the school year,
and that it blew up inside a fifth-floor history classroom around 10:45
a.m. in front of about 20 other students.

The stabbings — and the presence of a switchblade in the school — stirred
complaints from some parents that the school did not have metal detectors
and prompted questions from reporters to the mayor and police officials
about whether the school should have had them. Eighty-eight of the city’s
roughly 1,300 school buildings have metal detectors that are used either
full time or part time.

Among students and faculty, though, the talk was of the lives changed.

Shortly after they were released from the lockdown on Wednesday afternoon,
Asia Johnson and Yanique Heatley, both 18, stood outside the high school
at 2040 Mohegan Avenue in the West Farms neighborhood.

The two were friends with all three of the students involved, they said.
Ms. Heatley described Mr. Cedeno as “different from the other guys.”

“He likes Nicki Minaj, stuff from H&M. He likes Kylie Jenner,” she said.

“This hurts,” Ms. Johnson said. “No one should experience bullying but
there’s a way to handle it.”

“It’s really sad,” Ms. Heatley added. “Two boys might lose their lives and
our friend will never see the outside again.”

Mr. Sampson, the school’s dean, stood, visibly shaken, outside on Mohegan
Avenue. He had performed CPR on Matthew, he said. “Two of my students got
stabbed and one of them died,” Mr. Sampson said. “It was about what it’s
always about — bullying.”

At a news conference with police and school officials, Mayor Bill de
Blasio said the death had shaken him and many others in the community and
the city government.

“It’s unacceptable to ever lose a child to violence inside a school
building,” the mayor said. “All of us are feeling this tragedy very
personally.”

Later, he visited the school, emerging a short time after along with a
group of school staff members, many of them in tears.

In the first half of this year, the Police Department recorded 11 public
safety episodes at the school, which has 545 students in grades 6 through
12, according to department data. There were two arrests, both for
assault.

Police officials said on Wednesday that metal detectors could have
prevented the violence at the Wildlife Conservation school. But some
advocates argue that metal detectors create a negative environment and
make students feel as though they are under suspicion. Once installed,
scanners are rarely removed.

“This is a school, it was determined, that did not need metal detectors,”
said Chief Joanne Jaffe, who oversees the Police Department’s School
Safety Division.

The Wildlife Conservation school was started in 2007 by the Urban
Assembly, a nonprofit organization that runs 21 small schools across the
city, serving primarily low-income and academically struggling students.

Student test scores are low: This year 13 percent of the middle school
students passed the state reading tests, and 5 percent passed the state
math tests. In 2016, the school’s four-year high school graduation rate
was 73 percent. More than half of the high school students were
chronically absent that year, meaning they missed more than 10 percent of
school days.

Three years ago, the school changed principals, and it appears to have
faced some challenges since: In a school survey conducted last year, just
55 percent of students said that they felt safe in the hallways,
bathrooms, locker rooms and cafeteria, down from 74 percent the year
before.

On Wednesday, as the school was plunged into a lockdown, the safety felt
all the more elusive.

Lennette Berry’s 13-year-old daughter texted her from where she was
stranded, in theater class. A boy had attacked two of his classmates, the
girl, an eighth grader, wrote in a text message.

“Was he being bullied?” Ms. Berry texted back. “Yes,” her daughter
replied.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/27/nyregion/high-school-stabbing-
bronx.html