CHEROKEE COUNTY, Ga. — A 12-year-old boy says another student stabbed him in the eye with a pencil, leaving him with permanent damage.
The victim’s mother says this should have never happened because the school was supposed to keep the kids 20 feet apart.
The school acknowledges that something happened between the students, but Channel 2′s Tyisha Fernandes says the details don’t match up.
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The victim said his Cherokee Charter Academy schoolmate held the pencil and stabbed him in the eye, but the other boy said it was an accident.
Nicole Hodges says her son will be disfigured for life because a pencil ended up lodged in his eyeball while he was in class at Cherokee Charter Academy in Canton.
His mother said the problems started in August when another 12-year-old student started picking on her son.
“It was racial slurs, threats, and then it became physical,” Hodges said. “I talked to the administration. They said we’re gonna keep them separate. We’ll notify all the teachers, all those things. That’s what they promised us.”
A few weeks later the school called and said something else happened between the two boys.
Her son usually wears glasses.
“And he took his glasses off to rub his eyes and then the second he took his glasses off, he got the pencil in the eye,” Hodges said. “He was stabbed.”
The initial police report says “A 12-year-old who was stabbed in the eye with a pencil.”
But when Fernandes spoke to Cherokee County Deputies Thursday, they said further investigation made them question the intent.
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The criminal charge has been changed to “reckless conduct”.
A spokesperson for the school said, “We cannot comment on any specific student. We can say that we have never had a student stabbed in the eye. Any reports of that are incorrect.”
The boy’s mother continues to contend that what happened to her son was a stabbing, whether the pencil was thrown or someone pushed it into her son’s eye.
“You’d have to throw it like a dart! And as hard as you possibly could,” Hodges said. “You can’t cause that damage from just throwing a pencil across the table - there was intent.”
After the eyeball incident on Sept. 25, Hodges filed a restraining order and it got approved.
But that only meant the school had to keep the boys 20 feet apart.
Since administrators kept them in the same classes, the victim’s mother chose to remove her son from the school.
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