WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT
Middle school girl savagely beaten by classmate during caught-on-camera attack: ‘Nobody came to help’
Horrifying cellphone video shows a Southern California middle school girl being mercilessly thrashed by a female classmate during a fight said to be over a boy — as other students stand by and film the assault.
The attack happened at Arizona Middle School in Riverside County on Friday afternoon just as classes let out for the day — a week to the day after 16-year-old Kaylee Gain was beaten into unconsciousness during a strikingly similar fight at a St. Louis high school.
Footage recorded by a bystander shows the attacker, dressed in blue jeans and a dark sweatshirt, grabbing the California sixth-grade victim by the hair from behind, yanking her to the ground and repeatedly punching her in the head.
Several students mill about and watch the beating — with at least one seen recording the attack on her cellphone — but none of the children attempt to intervene.
“The fight goes on for about two minutes,” the victim’s mother, identified only as Jazmin, told KTLA. “Nobody came to help my daughter; no student came to stop this at all. So she was left alone.”
Jazmin claimed that the brawl was over a boy.
In another video obtained by the California outlet, the unnamed attacker appears to be getting ready to pounce on Jazmin’s daughter.
“I’m scared, my heart is beating,” the girl is heard saying in the video.
“Just fight her,” a friend eggs her on. “She’s not going to do s—t.”
“Should I just start pulling her hair?” the girl asks.
Jazmin, the victim’s mom, said it was not until later that she was called to the school and found her daughter — a shy honor student — sobbing with a swollen face and clumps of hair missing from her head.
“At that point, I just held her and I hugged her,” Jazmin said. “I’ve seen multiple things on social media of when kids are brutally attacked and they’re killed.”
The distraught mom filed a police report and contacted school officials to see if her daughter’s attacker would be expelled, but she said because the girl is a minor, no one was able to tell her anything definitive.
Police said the teen who started the fight could face criminal charges of misdemeanor assault and battery.
Jazmin said she has received assurances from school administrators that her daughter is “going to be fine” if she returns to class, but the worried mom said she has decided to pull her daughter from the school.
She said she has since been told that her daughter’s assailant is no longer at Arizona Middle School.
“I want to see justice,” Jazmin said. “I want justice to be served for my daughter because I feel like it’s another fight and they’re brushing everything under the rug.”
The schoolyard attack in California comes amid the fallout from the harrowing attack on Kaylee Gain near Hazelwood East High School in Spanish Lake, Mo., earlier this month.
Gain suffered a fractured skull and a brain bleed, and remained unconscious 11 days after having her head slammed into the pavement during the caught-on-camera March 8 assault.
