Any good lawyer is going to argue that “physical pain” part.
No bully is going to admit to be being so not tough that they were physically hurt by a drink. As pain is ephemeral and subjective, how would they prove there was pain?
Were the bullying properly addressed by the school from the get go, then the parent wouldn’t have needed to act in defense of their child But continuing the logic of that statute (the language surrounding the section you pointed out seeming to focus on care facilities, e.g. schools), then the school is EQUALLY on the hook for negligently allowing the bully to come to “physical pain”
It would have had the same result. There wasn’t anything toxic here (if there was enough salt to be toxic, the kid wouldn’t have drunk it), the drink-thief just assumed, because it didn’t taste the way he expected, that it was poisoned, and reacted accordingly. Which makes the legal action ridiculous.
I don’t know that “I’m freaked out because this drink doesn’t taste the way I expected” counts as any of those, though… What’s described wasn’t toxic, it was just unpleasant. There weren’t any common food allergens in it, and does a drink theft victim really have a legal obligation to give a list of ingredients to the thief before they swill it?
If the bully didn’t know what was in the drink they’d just imbibed then they might have had every reason to believe they’d just been poisoned. The stress and panic alone could account for those symptoms.
No, I don’t think this concoction could cause medical nausea. It would taste bad. It’s not ipecac.
If the concern is actual poisoning, then it should apply to actual poisoning. If the concern is a bad reaction to something that was not intentional, don’t drink or eat someone else’s food or drink. Whether coerced or not, t is a very important lesson that seems to be missing here.
Who gives a shit. Don’t eat or drink anything that doesn’t belong to you!!! There shouldn’t be anything controversial about that.
I agree wholeheartedly. But the article says the mom told her kid to give the bully this drink, so that complicates things a bit. And whether the bully “had it coming” is a seperate question than whether they were faking the nausea. Kids rarely go to the hospital for fun.
In this crime, while he may not be a likable victim, he is the victim. And he’s a child. If this were to go to trial, they wouldn’t make him take the stand and testify to his nausea or pain. They’re going to submit the hospital records and that’s it.
The bullying and the lack of addressing it by the school is problematic, but it absolutely does not excuse the mother’s actions. Am I living in the upside down right now? What the hell is wrong with all of you? We cannot have parents doing this. And the mother’s child was not assaulted. What the mother did absolutely is assault. Escalation is not how we deal with things. It’s just not. Deal with the school bullying issue, absolutely, but you cannot let the mother’s actions here go unpunished.
Sure, but that doesn’t justify what the mother did. Jesus, what the hell is wrong with all of you? And I like you, so I’m not flagging your comment, but it’s victim blaming.
I read that as, “since he takes your drink every day anyway, let him try this!” I somehow doubt the bullied kid walked up to the bully in the hallway and gave it to him as a present.
The victim is the kid who was being bullied. The bully just drank something he shouldn’t have, and it tasted bad. Charging this as a crime is a massive over-reaction. There’s no victim blaming here, though there seems to be confusion about who the victim is.
IMO, Gatorade is salty on its own. that mild salinity is part of its formulation as an electrolyte replenisher. adding lemon might help the flavor, but extra salt and vinegar ? yeah bully kid probably thought he was poisoned and that is his guilty conscience giving him up!
not that any of that matters. mom should never have “taken revenge” in any manner other than approaching the school amd the kid’s parents first to get ahead of escalating reactions.
that said, in the post’s illustration, the mom looks to be ready to launch a “snot rocket” into that lemonade. no way i’m a bully stealing that!
^^ This is the statute from @danimagoo 's post. Sure is a good thing the statute lists “serious bodily injury” and also “bodily injury.” That is both redundant and repetitive.
If this was the initial reaction, then I agree with you. If it had been reported and nothing was done by the school, then I disagree. This wasn’t a harmful drink. It just tasted bad. Sounds like an appropriate level of escalation to address an ongoing problem and poetic as well.
I know I’m carrying baggage from my own childhood into this discussion and readily admit it. But I am totally unsurprised by the idea that the bully acted like they were poisoned. Totally in line with the bullies I dealt with in school.
This discussion is making me more upset than it should, so I’m going to bow out, but I’ll leave with this: if we want to discourage people from harming kids (good!) then we should focus on enforcing that on actual harm, not bullshit. This was bullshit.
If her son had come up with the scheme it would be totally understandable. But this wasn’t a case of the victim fighting back, it was a case of the victim’s mom escalating a bad situation her kid had little control over as it was.
The bully was more likely to respond by committing an act of retaliatory violence against her son rather than leaving the poor kid alone.
A bully can also be a victim. This is an adult committing an assault on a child. It’s a minor assault with no permanent damage, but it’s still assault. The mother’s behavior is unacceptable.
Sure, what if she put rat poison or a hand grenade in it? But I think the significant point here is, she didn’t. There wasn’t anything harmful, nor did she intend to cause harm. Those both seem like crucial differences from the potential scenarios you’re conjuring. This wasn’t a booby-trap situation. It just didn’t taste good. Can “not tasting good” qualify as “assault”?
If the bully stole a drink that a child was themself intending to drink, that the thief believed to be something else, and had the same reaction - or even had an allergic reaction - would the theft-victim’s parents be liable? What if they knew a bully might steal their child’s drink? Yeah, it’s not exactly the same as what’s described, but seems closer than a hypothetical poisoned drink scenario.
But doing what exactly? Giving their kids unpalatable drinks to carry around? Dealing with bullying on their own? That I agree with - the parent should have been talking to the school about the situation, not coming up with her own solutions (so to speak). Of course, that assumes that hadn’t already happened (sounds like it hadn’t), and that the school had any sort of useful response to bullying in general.
Yeah, the biggest problem seems to be that it was both childish and unhelpful as a response to bullying.
Taking the law into their own hands. And intent here refers to her actions being intentional rather than accidental. If you shoot someone in the leg because you want to incapacitate them but don’t want to kill them, but you hit an artery and they bleed out, you are still guilty of murder. Intention refers to the intention of your actions, not the end results. Now, it does matter in some respects. Like, if your intent is a joke rather than to cause harm. But the mother’s intent here wasn’t humor. She wanted to punish the bully for stealing her kid’s drinks. That’s plenty enough intent for the charge involved. The only close legal issue here is whether the nausea and discomfort the bully felt constitute bodily harm. I believe they do. A bunch of you are apparently mind readers, or have access to knowledge not publicly available, since you think he was faking. An adult did this to him, on purpose, and he is a child. Just because he’s not sympathetic doesn’t mean this is ok. It isn’t.
Since I’m still getting pinged about it, I guess I will respond against my better judgement.
First, all of the information provided is according to police. Nothing from the bullied child or mother’s side of this story. Do we seriously at this point not know better than to trust the word of not just the police but the Bexar County police!?!
Second, turns out the mom is a nurse and knew this was a harmless concoction. So there was no intent to injure and no actual injury. So I think this case will be dismissed in no time flat.
Third, sone of the other articles on the topic say that the bully wasn’t given the icky drink, he stole it - again. That makes it more akin to an ink pack in a stack of bank bills that explodes harmlessly onto bank robbers than a boobie trap handed to an innocent and unsuspecting stranger.
Now I’m out and I’m going to mute this thread. It had me shaking with emotion earlier and I’d rather not go there again. Don’t fucking @ me, as Matt Mercer would say.
I think this too falls under the umbrella of mind-reading. The report from the sheriff’s office read
it conducted an investigation and learned that the mother had " intentionally mixed the contents of the drink to allegedly prevent her son’s drink from being stolen at school by other students."
Which could just as easily be read as “she made something so unpalatable that other students would stop trying to take the kid’s food.”
