My point is, if we’re going to use hypotheticals where the mom did something she didn’t do, that sword cuts both ways. I also think there is a distinction between forcing someone to consume something unpleasant and allowing them to do so based on their own bad behavior.
The article says that the police say that the mom told her son to give the drink to the bully. As others point out, that’s not how bullying works. After several times when the bully coerced the victim to give up his drink, the coercion is built in. It’s the default condition in the dynamic. The bully chose to continue the cooercion and chose to consume a beverage that was not his. Culpability for that lies primarily on the bully.
I agree, but not all kids and not all parents have the tools to manage conflicts like that. I’ll repeat, I don’t think what the mom did was the right thing to do, but I understand why she might have done it and there is simply no way in hell it was a crime.
Maybe, maybe not, but if the bully was being protected by the school, how in the hell did she NOT expect this to happen if it came out what she did? Not that people should base their actions on whether or not the bully and his enablers are going to retaliate (because that’s some victim blaming BS), there are STILL other options here, including making a public stink about what’s happening to her son.
Yeah… like on one hand I feel guilty for being so bluntly not-optimistic about how things are sounding but based on what I hear from people with kids is right there really is a fast deterioration post-covid from an already bad situation and against the political backdrop, the breakdowns in the GOP, the economic realities of Texas, and the importance of school vouchers to wealthy conservatives and segregationists… If anyone knows where some people are talking about what we can do though… damn I want to hear that conversation too!
With the knowledge that he had stolen and consumed Gatorade previously, presumably without ill effects? Yes, she did. She didn’t add anything biologically different than the ingredients already in Gatorade. He’d already established a lack of allergy to those ingredients. Or maybe he did get sick from multiple previous stolen Gatorades, and went back for more anyway. In that (unlikely) scenario, well, as they say in Texas, you can’t fix stupid.
Agreed. But it’s not a crime.
I don’t have any good answers. I can understand the desperation of a parent trying to deal with the bullying of their child. Desperation often leads to bad decisions. In my opinion, what the mom did here was wrong, but probably the least wrong of any of the adults in this situation. The school admin is more wrong, the police are more wrong.
This is totally on the button. To paraphrase Paracelsus, “The dose makes the poison”. In this case, with a single sip of the unpalatable Gatorade, the bully probably consumed less salt than in a bag of pretzels, less lemon juice than in a glass of lemonade, and less vinegar than that found in a couple of pickles. Call 911!
But equating adding some of the ingredients commonly found in a Lemon Vinaigrette (lemon juice + salt + vinegar minus the oil) to make something unexpectedly undesirable with an attempt to poison someone is a pretty considerable leap.
Make no mistake, the bully was genuinely threatened by this incident. Not by tasting the nasty Gatorade, but by the fact that someone was actually attempting to fight back against them.
A challenge to their dominance is something that a bully needs to immediately quash if they want to be able to continue their relentless campaign of harassment and aggression against their victim. His sqealing “I’ve been poisoned!” after tasting a Lemon Vinaigrette Gatorade is an obvious attempt to punish his victim for standing up to him.
In my mind, this is how I imagine this situation played out…
Bully habitually seizes food/drinks from his victim.
Victim’s mother renders a bottle of Gatorade undesirable with common kitchen ingredients and gives it to her son in an attempt to discourage future food/drink seizures by the bully.
Bully unsurprisingly seizes the unpalatable Gatorade, which the victim surrenders to them willingly.
Bully tries to savor his tainted plunder and realizes that the victim is actually trying to fight back against his bullying.
Bully factitiously goes full Munchausen by pitching a fit and declaring that he has been poisoned.
Bully’s enablers clutch their pearls and rush the swooning Drama King off to the Hospital.
Bullies and their Enablers tirelessly work to ensure that anyone who attempts to challenge the natural order of bullying are punished for having the audacity to question a bully’s inalienable right to intimidate, torment and persecute their victims.
Yes. Plus I read that the bully’s parents WORK AT THE SCHOOL (probably gonna owe many a coke because I haven’t read the entire thread but thought it was worth repeating).
@danimagoo and @anon61221983 are absolutely correct, this was both a criminal act and very unethical.
While the family will try to press charges of assault, the applicable section of the Texas penal code appears to be 42.07(2), harassment and possibly 42.07(9)(c)(2)(A) that the offense was committed against a child with the intent or effect of causing the child to harm themselves. It appears to be a misdemeanor. A decent lawyer could probably get the bully’s family to drop the charges just to get them out of the news cycle and out of the public eye.
It doesn’t appear to be according to the Texas Penal code. I couldn’t find a definition of poisoning in the code (it seems to be generally covered under murder, attempted murder, and manslaughter). However, poison is considered to be:
As others have noted, the ingredients are not, by themselves and in normal quantities poisons. The mother, being a nurse probably chose them for that very reason. She certainly could have made a more interesting concoction using materials she might have access to on the job.
This seems likely. She could also lose her license. As a medical professional, she should know better than to give anything to a child without their knowledge or without parental consent, and as an adult she should know she shouldn’t retaliate against a child.
Possibly, but the opposite could be true. Thanks to Saint Streisand the other kids in the school probably know by now that the bully went to the hospital because of some salt and vinegar in the Gatorade. I wouldn’t be surprised if the bully is mercilessly mocked and tormented with lemons, vinegar, salt, and old fashioned verbal abuse. The bully has to know — or will soon learn — that anyone else they try to take something from will also contaminate their food or drink, and not necessarily with anything as harmless as salt and vinegar. This is also bad; as good as karmic retribution may feel, it just perpetuates the cycle of bullying and doesn’t improve anybody’s life.
The primary word I object to in this otherwise excellent analysis is “give.” She didn’t give it to the bully. I don’t care what the police or school description of the event was - as soon as that bullying predatory behavior was established, the victim didn’t “give” the bully anything - it was coerced. He took it. That is a critically important point that seems to be glossed over, and to do so misses the fundamental nature of bullying dynamics.
If the mom loses her license, she’s welcome to move to Oregon. We have a nursing shortage and our cops, while not great, aren’t this bad.
It is quite probable that the bully ended up at the hospital because the school has no on-site nurse to determine of a child needs more treatment than a cot to rest on for half an hour or a band-aid. Sending the bully to the ER covered the school from any suggestion that they weren’t taking the “poisoning” seriously.
Yes and no. She didn’t directly give the bully the bottle, but she did prepare the concoction with the knowledge and intent that the bully would take it and drink it.
An analogy would be if an abused wife made a batch of poison chocolate chip cookies and set them out on the dining room table. “Gee, your honor, sure I made these poison cookies but I never physically handed them to my husband; I wasn’t even home when he ate them,” isn’t going to be much of a defense, even though she may be a sympathetic figure.
She essentially caused direct “harm” through indirect means. It’s still a crime, though it appears to be a misdemeanor (and I think just a class b, meaning up to 6 months in jail and up to $2000 fine).
No, the kid probably wasn’t physically harmed. Yes, he shouldn’t be taking people’s stuff. No, the mother shouldn’t have pulled a prank on the bully. Yes, this probably would have been better as a teaching moment. But here we are. Everyone is wrong (except maybe the bullied kid if they knew nothing about the spiked gatorade), but one side is more sympathetic than the other.
Not precisely. She knew the bully might take it. He might not. He might have realized the error of his ways. It still took a hostile act on his part in order for him to, and I’ll point this out again because for all the talk of poison and assault and crime it seems to have been lost, taste something mildly unpleasant.
All of the analogies and hypotheticals that have been laid out in this thread fail in that they imagine harm like poison or violence when no harm was done and no harm was intended.
Can you specify the harm and provide any detail on what that harm was?
