A South Atlanta High school student claimed that on Oct. 3 he touched a teacher on the shoulder and the teacher went nuts and shoved him across a desk. Well, video of the incident was obtained by a news station and it seems like the teen was telling the truth.
Footage obtained by Channel 2 Action News of the incident appears to show the 17-year-old brush past the graduation coach who leaps from his seat and shoves the teen.
The teen told the news station that he tapped teacher Henry Coleman on the shoulder and said, “What’s up?”
“I just felt my body, my whole body, just fly into the table with books on it. He came to the table, slung me off the table to the ground,” the teen said.
The teen and the teacher were both charged in the incident, but the school pushed to have the teen’s charges dropped.
“He just went crazy. I don’t understand why,” the teen’s mother, Shekela Bryant, said. “To choke, to push him on the ground by his face. It’s just too much, too much for a good morning tap.”
While the video doesn’t show what happened after the push, Bryant claims the graduation coach began pummeling her son.
Coleman now faces a simple battery charge.
“Oh, no way, no way. That was not a battery,” the teen’s father, Jamil Koonce told the news station. “That was a brutal attack.”
The teen’s father added that after viewing the video, “I was very angry and very shocked.”
Coleman claimed the child punched him in the arm, which is what lead to his attack. But the video didn’t confirm Coleman’s account of what took place.
“He told the truth. Exactly what happened is what he said happened. I told you so,” attorney Kimberly Bandoh told the news station.
Now, the parents want Coleman to face stiffer punishment.
“That was aggravated assault, cruelty to children,” Koonce said.
“It’s crazy. I just can’t get it. I don’t understand why he would attack a child like that,” Bryant said.
The student no longer attends South Atlanta High School and Coleman has been terminated, Channel 2 News reports.