A fight that began when a baby carrot was thrown in a Harlem high school has turned into a lawsuit against the city by the family whose son was beaten so savagely that his jaw was broken in two places.
Amara Camara, 17, is currently facing felony charges for the brutal Oct. 22 beatdown at A. Philip Randolph Campus High School, but the family of the injured student say they believe that the school bears some responsibility for the cafeteria attack.
According to victim Felipe Castillo, nobody moved to stop Camara from putting him in a headlock and striking him repeatedly, despite there being a school security officer and teacher’s aide assigned to the room.
Only half of the usual number of adult monitors were keeping order as well, Castillo charges.
“It was a serious assault,” step-father Miguel Cepada said.
Castillo is still on a soft food diet because of the screws in his mouth. Doctors have said his jaw will probably have to be wired shut another two weeks. And he’s been told he’s likely to lose his front tooth and a molar.
“He could have killed him,” Cepada said.
The brawl allegedly started when Camara thought Castillo, 17, threw a carrot. A videotape taken on a cellphone shows Camara make contact at least 14 times with Castillo’s face, Cepada said.
“There was blood everywhere,” Castillo said.
The family says the beating lasted roughly 17 minutes, and claims school officials did not call the police until 10 minutes after Castillo had already been cleaned up in the nurse’s office. “They wanted to sweep it under the rug,” Cepada said.
The school also did not immediately suspend Camara, Cepada claims.
Castillo said he was “shocked” that police initially charged Camara with a misdemeanor assault. “I was in the hospital worrying about my surgery and he was just going around like nothing happened,” Castillo said.
Ultimately, Camara was suspended for three weeks and charged with a felony assault, but he remained free on no bail.
The family’s lawyer Edward Steinberg says that the school’s negligence made the cafeteria dangerous. “It had a duty to provide adequate supervision and failed to do that,” he said.
The public school is not on the official list of most dangerous schools, but the fracas comes after reports last fall that a student was shot in the face with a BB gun while in class. Months earlier, a group of freshmen started a petition to asking administrators to make the school safer.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Education said “these are serious allegations and we treat them as such,” adding that the department was looking into the incident.
Meanwhile, Castillo, a good student who had been tapped to recruit others to the school, but transferred after the fight, said he would now warn teens against going there.
But the assault has not deterred him from his dream of going into law enforcement. “This just makes me more determined,” he said.
Camara declined to comment to the News.
With Rocco Parascandola and Eli Rosenberg
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