Justified? Police use pepper spray to subdue 8-year-old

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Justified? Police use pepper spray to subdue 8-year-old

Despite son’s violent behavior, mom says police should have handled differently

The mother of an 8-year-old Colorado boy pepper-sprayed by police after he

exploded into a violent rage says she believes that the school and police are

partly to blame for allowing the incident to spiral out of control.

“The school he was at was for children who have social and emotional behavioral

issues,” the boy’s mom, Mandy, who is identified only by her first name to

protect her family’s privacy, told TODAY’s Meredith Vieira Wednesday. “They

[knew] what the kids are capable of before they took them on. And then they

could have also called and asked for a special [police] unit who deals with

children … in these crisis situations.”

The incident, which garnered national attention, began on Feb. 22 in Lakewood,

Colo. — the same school district that became synonymous with school violence

when two students at Columbine High School went on a bloody rampage in 1999 that

left 15 dead. Aidan, a second-grader at the school, suddenly turned on his two

teachers, who were alone with him in the classroom.

By the time police arrived, young Aidan was in a full-blown meltdown. He had

ripped molding from the wall and tossed chairs and a TV cart around the

classroom. He had grabbed a stick and chased his teachers into the office, where

they locked themselves in. “I wanted to make something sharp,” he told NBC News.

“I was so mad at them.” At one point, police allege, he warned his teachers, “If

you come out, you’re gonna die!”

Aidan said he does not remember what triggered his rage. “I don’t know,” he told

Vieira. “It’s just the way my body goes.”

In fact, it was not the first time that Aidan’s anger issues had led to a

confrontation with police. Twice before, authorities had to be summoned to “talk

him down” after outbursts in school, his mother said. It is part of a pattern,

she said, that seems to appear only when Aidan is in school, and only at

particular times. “He’s a normal 8-year-old child at home with us, when he goes

got see his dad in Wyoming, when he’s at soccer, swimming, [with the] baby

sitter, he’s fine,” she told Vieira. “We don’t have these issues.” At school,

however, things are different. “Usually it’s a transition period from a

structured event, such as social studies or reading, into a free time and then

going back into a structured event that he has a problem,” she said. Doctors and

therapists have evaluated the boy, she said, and can find no cause for his

periodic outbursts. “They all say there’s nothing mentally wrong with him.”

Video: Kid wields stick, police use pepper spray (on this page)

She insists that his two previous scrapes with police ended without serious

incident because the police who responded were specially trained to deal with

children in crisis situations.

This time, however, the situation quickly escalated. Police insist that they

ordered the boy to drop the stick and when he refused, they squirted him twice

with pepper spray.

But Aidan told a slightly different version of the story to Vieira Wednesday. He

said that he had already dropped the stick when police sprayed him. “The first

time they said it, I just kind of did it slowly and then once it touched the

ground, that’s when it happened.”

Police contend that they handled the matter appropriately, and the school

district’s superintendent, Peg Kastberg, defended their actions. “They tried to

de-escalate the behavior that occurred; [Aidan] was swinging a stick, he was

using it as a weapon, he was violent, he was verbal, he was abusive,” she told

NBC News.

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No charges have been filed against the boy. He has since been enrolled in

another school that specializes in children with behavioral problems. But the

boy’s mother continues to insist that authorities could have handled the

situation differently. She said she believes that police with proper training

could have defused or at least stabilized the situation until she arrived. “I

was 10 minutes away,” she said.

And proper training, she says, is what she would like to see come out of this

situation. “I do want them to get training ... for crisis situations with

children. I don’t think it’s right for an 8-year-old to get pepper-sprayed.”