When Diane John got a call from her son’s school saying he’d gotten into a fight with a teacher, she thought the boy was lying when he insisted he’d done nothing wrong.
Then she got a call from the Daily News.
“Oh my god!” she gasped when The News first showed her a shocking video revealing what really happened to 15-year-old Kristoff John during the March 6 incident at school. “No! No! No!”
The exclusive video obtained by the paper shows the scrawny freshman taking a severe beating from a much larger teacher at the George Westinghouse Career and Technical Education High School in Brooklyn.
The video shows shop teacher and security dean Stephan Hudson grabbing the boy by his arm, throwing him to the ground and bashing him twice against a table.
At the end of the fight, the boy is apprehended by school cops.
“They lied to me!” the betrayed mom said tearfully when The News showed her the clip for the first time. “No one wants to see their son taken advantage of and beaten like this.”
The school had told her that her son had been the aggressor in a “little incident” with a teacher, she said.
She was told that the school was being generous by not punishing the boy.
Now, she said, she’s furious — and wants answers.
Kristoff said the attack left his back so sore that he couldn’t walk properly for several days.
“I was fearing for my life,” he said. “I was surprised he hit me. I didn’t have time to think.”
The 5-foot-3 boy who weighs just 116 pounds said he transferred out of the school after the incident and is now living with an aunt in his family’s native Grenada.
He said he did nothing to provoke the altercation.
The teacher, Hudson, refused to talk to The News when confronted at the school’s graduation and again at his Jersey City home.
The school’s principal, Janine Kieran, also did not respond to several requests for comment.
An Education Department spokeswoman said Hudson, who has been working in city schools since 1990 and makes $95,202, was disciplined over the incident but declined to elaborate.
According to Kristoff, the scuffle began on a morning when he was running late for class. When he swiped his security card at the school entrance, it didn’t work and he tried to push through.
Hudson, who at nearly 300 pounds is more than twice the boy’s size, grabbed the young man by the arm to stop him, a surveillance video shows.
When the boy yanked his arm away, Hudson grabbed him again and brutally threw him to the floor, before dragging him across a table and wrestling him to the ground.
As horrified students began to gather in a crowd, three school safety agents arrived and tackled the boy. Hudson walked away.
Kids who saw the fight said it was a one-sided beatdown.
“Mr. Hudson should’ve let him go,” said Arleth Morfe, 17, a senior from Bayside who witnessed the altercation, adding, “It looked like Kristoff was having a panic attack.”
That afternoon, it was Hudson who made the call to Kristoff’s mother. He told her that Kristoff had attacked him but that he would graciously settle the matter quietly.
“He said they would shake hands and work it out, but I never knew the extent of it,” said John, adding, “They didn’t tell me anything else.”
When John’s son got home, he told her that Hudson had started the dustup and that his back had been injured by the muscular, 39-year-old dean.
“He said, but mom, you haven’t seen the video,” said John, who claims she asked principal Kieran to locate the footage.
“The principal told me she was going to look into it and get back to me — but she never got back to me,” said John, who let the matter drop.
After a few weeks the boy was still miserable and complaining of being bullied at school — so John sent him to live with her sister in Grenada.
Now that she’s seen the video, John wants Education officials and police to investigate the incident.
In the meantime, she believes that Hudson should be removed from the school.
“That man should be gone,” she said.
Diplomat Derrick James, Grenada’s consul general in New York, said his office will look into the matter.
“We are going to look into this and see what we can do as a community to make sure that this does not happen to any child,” said James, adding, “What’s most troubling is that the parent was lied to.”
With Kerry Burke, Dan McCarthy and Joe Kemp
bchapman@nydailynews.com
