Teenager Faces Charges for Assault with a Tiny Carrot
A Virginia teenager is facing assault and battery charges for allegedly attacking one of her old teachers with, of all things, a baby carrot.
It sounds ridiculous, but according to ABC News, 14-year-old Aliya Nigro threw a baby carrot at her former middle-school French teacher in the hallway of her high school, and now she is reportedly facing charges. Nigro says she “tossed” the carrot in the teacher’s direction and accidentally hit the woman in the forehead, despite intending to aim it somewhere lower than the woman’s face. The difference between “toss to” and “throw at” is impossible to ascertain after the effect, but intentional or not, the end result was that Nigro launched a baby carrot and hit the teacher square in the forehead. The incident was caught on film, and both sides agree that the weapon was an airborne baby carrot that Nigro had left over from her lunch. Nigro’s actions were juvenile and irresponsible and she should definitely be punished, but charging her with assault and battery still seems pretty excessive.
Nigro threw the carrot, and even though the carrot was reportedly only an inch and three quarters long and not even one of the “big” baby carrots in the bag, the school did not think it was even remotely funny. Nigro was promptly suspended and has been out of school for a solid month so far, and it is yet unclear when she will be allowed back.
According to Raw Story, the teacher made the call to go forward with assault and battery charges against the 14-year-old. In a statement, she said that the forcefulness of the impact and the specificity of the targeting convinced her that the attack was intentional.
Still, Nigro’s mother says she’s flabbergasted by the extreme charges against her daughter for throwing a baby carrot.
“I don’t understand this,” said Nigro’s mother, Kerri May. ”Yes, it happened, and I can see a couple of days in school detention or even a couple days out-of-school suspension. But this goes way beyond that. We have to go to court, and her charges aren’t small: assault and battery with a weapon.”
Throwing raw carrots at teachers is a spectacularly dumb move, and getting hit by something like that can hurt a lot more than one would expect. But kicking a freshman out of school for an extended period of time and charging her with assault and battery seems like a significant overreaction on the part of the teacher and the school.
(Photo: Cheezburger)
