A Passaic County woman was attacked and knocked unconscious after complaining to a school vice principal about three students who threatened her son and told him “to go back to Mexico,” the woman’s attorney said Tuesday.
Beronica Ruiz, 35, was attacked June 19 as she pushed a stroller with her 1-year-old baby inside and her 12-year-old son walking with her, according to her attorney, Daniel Santiago of Clifton.
“This was a horrific and brutal attack,” Santiago told NJ Advance Media. “It takes a certain level of insanity to brutally attack a mother with a stroller and leave her for dead.”
The woman was hospitalized for two days after a 13-year-old student – one of three who had been taunting her son – “essentially jumped my client,” Santiago said.
She suffered a fractured eye socket, bruises and a bloodied eye that remained red for days.
The day before the attack, Ruiz’s son endured taunts in the cafeteria according to the attorney.
“They were chanting, ‘Mexicans should go back behind the wall,’” Santiago said. When the boy countered, “We all come from immigrants,” the bullies threatened violence, Santiago said.
When the boy reported the incident to school officials, they sequestered him for the remainder of the day, either in an office or classroom, Santiago said.
But nobody called the child’s parents, he said. When the boy went home that afternoon, he told his mother about the threats and said he was afraid to go back to school.
The mother then went to the school and complained to a vice principal and demanded to know why school officials had not informed her about the threats of violence, Santiago said.
The vice principal admitted to the mother that he should have called them but that he had become busy with other matters, Santiago said.
“That’s a woefully inadequate response,” Santiago said. “'My bad’ is not a good excuse for not calling (the parents), not telling them.”
To make matters worse, school officials did not immediately discipline the attacker. Instead, they told the mother that the attacker “had just as much right to an education as her son,” Santiago said.
It was only after the boy’s father, Alfonso Vasquez, contacted Passaic Mayor Hector Lora that the teen bully was suspended, Santiago said.
N.J. mom beaten unconscious by school bully who threatened her son in hate crime, lawyer says
Beronica Ruiz, 35, of Passaic, was attacked June 19 after complaining that students at Passaic Gifted and Talented Academy School No. 20 told her son to "go back to Mexico."
www.nj.com
The attorney said he plans to file suit against the school on behalf of the family, saying “lawsuits are the only thing that large institutions listen to.”
I don't know he could sue the mother of the little thug that jumped her- but there is no money in that.