A video of a Texas school officer slamming a 12-year-old student on the ground has gone viral on the internet. It shows the officer, identified as Joshua Kehm, roughly handling the girl after trying to stop a fight.
The slamming was hard enough that it knocked the student out. The act has outraged advocates and netizens on social media. Here are five facts you should know about what happened:
1) The incident stemmed from an altercation between two female students in the middle school.
It started with bullying and the fight took place March 29 at Rhodes Middle School in San Antonio, Texas. The girl in the video was identified as Janissa Valdez, a sixth grader. "I was going up to [the other girl] to tell her let's go somewhere else so we could talk but that's when the cop thought I was going at her," Janissa told News 4 San Antonio.
2) The 12-year-old was slammed so hard she was briefly unconscious.
Other students are heard asking Janissa if she's okay several times in the video and one said that she landed on her face. "You could just hear where she hits the ground. And it's nothing but concrete, cement," Janissa's mom, Gloria Valdez, said. "She wasn't moving. She was just knocked out."
Valdez claims that since the incident, her daughter has been having severe headaches, per Ghost-O. The site is the source of the viral video below:
Valdez also acknowledges that Janissa has been bullied in the past. "I talked to a counselor, the vice principal and principal, and they said they'd look into it. Finally, the other student started attacking her and got into a fight, and it led to my daughter getting suspended (for three days)," she told My San Antonio.
3) The school district has cited the Texas school officer.
Kehm is already on administrative leave following the video release and the school board is looking into the incident further. "We certainly want to understand what all occurred, and we are not going to tolerate excessive force in our district," school district spokesperson Leslie Price said in the San Antonio report.
4) Who is Joshua Kehm?
Ghost-O reports that Kehm started working as a school officer with the San Antonio Independent School District in February 2015, but his LinkedIn account has since been removed. He used to be with the Air Force and was a weapons and security trainer. He's a family man with one daughter.
5) Advocates believe school officers have no place in schools.
Civic group Advancement Project released a statement denouncing Kehm's action said that it is hard to entrust the student's safety when school officers are doing the disciplining. "[These] matters are best suited for trained educators and counselors," the director of the group, Judith Browne Dianis, said per Washington Post.
