A Teacher’s Story

To recount what happened in the hall that morning, I can only repeat what I’ve been told by numerous ­eyewitnesses. I remember nothing of the assault. That in itself is quite a blessing.

Apparently, I was in the hall at Germantown High School, where I’d been a teacher since 2001. I was walking with an iPod in my hand. I have no idea where I might have been going. I do know that the phone in my room wasn’t working. Perhaps I was looking for someone.

Anyway, Donte Boykin, the student in my class whose iPod set everything in motion, was following me. I saw this on the surveillance tape, weeks later, in the hospital. I then disappear into a crowd, pushed from the back by Donte.

I seem to have become a volleyball between Donte and James Footman, a student with a troubled past who shouldn’t have been in the hallway, who probably shouldn’t even have been at Germantown, because of his violent history.

I can’t imagine how I was shoved back and forth between them, but that’s what the reports say. The second time I landed in Footman’s arms, he hit me. The reports say I was punched a few times. They say that as I stumbled away, he pursued me and punched me again, driving me to the ground. They say that on the way down, I crashed into the lockers. Was it there that I received the gash to my head?

Someone took a picture with a cell phone of me lying passed out on the floor, my head in a pool of my own blood. They tell me that I had at least one and maybe more seizures. They tell me that I soiled myself. My friend Beckey still has the clothes I wore somewhere, in a plastic bag.