Cy-Fair ISD parents shared with KPRC 2 footage of a fight at Cypress Springs High School this week.
They were alarmed for two reasons:
- The 42-second clip shows a Cy-Fair ISD police officer, attempting to break up the fight, grabbing a student, lifting him and slamming him to the ground.
- A viewer whose daughter captured the fight on her cell phone was suspended the following day for violating the district’s cell phone policy.
The district police department says the student was charging toward an assistant principal when officers got involved. They say the student had grabbed another officer’s gun and was trying to get it out of her holster. When the teen kept holding onto the gun, the officer picked up the student and threw him to the ground.
Here’s the Cy-Fair ISD Police Department’s full statement on what happened:
While being escorted to the office, a juvenile at Cypress Springs HS threatened and then attempted to charge at an assistant principal. One of our officers stepped between them to stop the juvenile. The officer was trying to detain the juvenile to prevent further violence. The female officer fell to the ground while attempting to assist her partner officer. The juvenile then reached around the female officer, grabbed her service weapon, and tried to remove it from its holster. The second officer (male) grabbed the juvenile and pulled him away. The juvenile continued to hold on to the gun, and the officer picked the student up and took him to the ground. In the cell phone video provided by the media, you can see the juvenile immediately get up from the ground and continue to fight with several individuals, including school staff and the officers. The incident remains under investigation.
One parent who didn’t want to be identified, fearing her daughter would be retaliated against, said she was deeply disturbed by the video.
“I’m horrified as a mother, seeing that student the way he was body slam and picked up on the ground like he was just like garbage,” the parent said. “I feel like [the officer] did not defuse the situation correctly or handle this student as if he was a student. He had to him as if he was a criminal, as if this was a TDCJ brawl.”
This is the parent’s first semester in the district and is disappointed with how the district has handled the episode.
“The children I feel like are not getting a proper education because there are teachers leaving and then also to the discipline it must start at home,” the parent said. “But also, he had no reason to basically pick that child up in almost take his life.”
