Posted on 03/10/2006 8:43:53 PM PST by Samwise
Several Martinsville High School students say teachers stopped their calls to 911 while a fellow student was choking, because cell phones aren't allowed on campus.
Witnesses tell police the victim was rushing to finish his lunch before leaving the cafeteria, because you can't bring food outside. That's when they say he started choking, went into cardiac arrest, and died at the hospital.
Multiple 911 calls went out from Martinsville High School.
Witnesses say Jesse Tucker choked on a hamburger. Paramedics rushed the 15 year-old freshman to the hospital, where he later died.
"It's really hard to grasp the fact that you witnessed someone's death," says one student, "It's really hard to take in."
24 Hour News 8 spoke to another student witness who also wants to remain anonymous. He says one of his friends tried to call 911 with his cell phone, but just as he reached an operator, he says a teacher closed his phone saying cell phones aren't allowed on campus.
"She just closed his phone. She didn't do much to help the situation. She was panicky, she didn't go to the nurse's office," says one of the students.
Martinsville Police Chief Frans Hollanders says the investigation is still in preliminary stages, and at this point, investigators aren't pointing fingers.
"We've heard rumors to such an effect, that a cell phone was slapped out of a kids hand," Hollanders says, "We haven't been able to determine that at all whatsoever."
School officicals wouldn't talk on camera, but we caught up with an assistant superintendent and he issued this statement, "We are still in shock. We do believe the teacher did everything she could in the situation."
The police chief is encouraging witnesses to share their stories with investigators.
24 Hour News 8 did speak to Jesse's father Friday night. Understandably, he says he's still in shock and just wants to know exactly what happened.
An autopsy is scheduled for Saturday morning.
Ya'd think!
Guess the schools are too busy expending their resources on maximizing liberal education to waste time on petty things such as that. /s
Prayers for the family indeed.
Indeed! Socialism has no provisions for the welfare of individuals.
This is about on the same level as an incident where a second or third grade girl got a drug record. A student on a school bus had a severe asthma attack, perhaps even anaphylactic (sp?) shock. The girl gave the student a hit off of her escape respirator. The physician at the ER said that was a life saver. Her reward - kicked out of school, arrested, drug record due to the zero tolerance policy.
>>Poor Ms. Genovese, she's probably one of NYC's most famous murder victims.<<
I do remember that now.
I think it was on a thread here on FR. BTW, correction: inhaler, not respirator. John Stossel may have mentioned it as well.
What happened is his child tried to eat a hamburger too fast and wound up choking. That is the proximate cause of his death. The business with the cell phones and everything else has very little to do with it.
Perhaps if somebody had been trained in First Aid and been on the spot to render help, this child could have been saved. But if you are waiting 20 minutes for the ambulance to rescue a choking victim, they're going to be 15 minutes too late. Whether they get there is 20 or 22 minutes is irrelevant.
Unfortunately, if you choke in front of a few people, somebody will step into save you. If you choke in front of a hundred people, a hundred people will stand there waiting for somebody else to save you.
That is why tell you in First Aid to just go in and do what you have to do, as if there is nobody else who can do it. Take charge of the situation, delegate people individually to help you with certain tasks like calling 911, and take care of the victim.
If a teacher prevented life saving treatment in order to enforce a rule about cell phone use, she most definently did kill the kid and should be prosecuted.
"I think that teacher needs some serious going-over. Nothing more than an irresponsible bureaucrat who prizes rules over lives."
I would have punched the teacher out and made the phone call. If this is true, I hope the idiot teacher is fired (at least).
If you'll read the article, "Multiple 911 calls went out from Martinsville High School."
EMS was called. EMS came. The student made it to the hospital, and died there.
The article doesn't say whether or not anyone tried Heimlich on the student.
"...What happened is his child tried to eat a hamburger too fast and wound up choking. That is the proximate cause of his death. The business with the cell phones and everything else has very little to do with it..."
You are 100% correct. The poor child died because his airway was blocked and oxygen was eliminated to his brain, heart, and bloodstream. Brain damage and subsequent death likely occured within moments of each other.
It seems that many are willing to embrace the whole "blame game" right off the bat. My understanding is that contemporary students "sass" teachers on a whim these days. Maintaining order amongst these little angels must take an enormous amount of effort, what with a couple hundred kids in a typical school...all enamored with their cellular telephones.
I find it difficult to believe a teacher encountered upon a student choking to death and promptly slapped the telephone out of the hands of a student calling emergency rescuers. There has got to be more to this story.
~ Blue Jays ~
If he made it to the hospital alive I don't see how choking could have been the primary cause of death.
I would attribute that to sloppy reporting. He was probably "declared dead" at the hospital. Your EMTs aren't going to declare a child dead in the field in a case like this. No way.
Did you see where the article said multiple calls had gotten through to 911 dispatch?
The teacher may be a raging idiot, but certainly did not cause the death anymore than a traffic cop who shows up at the scene of an accident and slaps the cellphone out of the hand of a bystander.
The kid choked on a hamburger and caused his own death. It's a pity nobody had training in the heimlich, and noone gave appropriate first aid.
"Zero tolerance"...I am trotting it out right now. Zero tolerance is just another way of saying "I am a public school teacher/official and do not have a brain or ethic worthy of being trusted to make wise decisions."
Zero tolerance was put into place when public school liberals were treating violent offenders in the schools like liberal judges were treating violent offenders in the judical system system which resulted in mandatory sentencing guidelines.
Also, as you may recall, we had liberal race baiting in full force where race pimps claimed that more Black students were kicked out of school than Whites because teachers are racists. As a result, spinless principals were afraid to expel gang members, rapists, violent attackers and murderers for fear of being called a racist. Zero tolerance was a way to up the numbers of white boys kicked out of school for offenses such as posessing an axe in the trunk of a car left over from a boy scout presentation or drawing a picture of a gun...
It says he died at the hospital. There's probably more too it than what's reported here.
Prayers for the family.
Maybe it was also a way of saying, "We've got better things to do with our time & money than fight stupid lawsuits in courts, so we'll very publicly apply the same standards to everyone and let the chips fall where they may?"
Or maybe it was a way of saying, "We don't want to seem negligent if a Columbine-style incident occurs here, so we're going to be extremely pro-active."
Would you rather that your tax money be spent fighting the lawsuits filed by the NAACP, etc., asserting that the schools are racist or negligent?
I don't recall that young of kids, but I do recall a thread on the same situation, but it was high school kids. High school girl gave her boyfriend her inhaler, or vice-versa. Same thing; expelled, arrested while preventing a serious health crisis.
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