11-Year-Old White Girl Charged With Hate Crime for Allegedly Assaulting Black Girl on School Bus

An 11-year-old white girl was charged with a hate crime after the parent of an African-American girl said her daughter was beaten and subjected to racially-motivated language on a school bus, local news station WWNY reports. Police received a complaint from the parent on Sept. 10 that described the victim’s injuries—including a black eye from being punched, lost hair due to her hair being pulled, and a bruise on her knee from falling backwards onto a bus seat. Police say the 11-year-old and another 10-year-old white girl, both students at New York’s Gouverneur Middle School, were responsible for the assault. The girls were subsequently charged with “second-degree harassment,” and the 11-year-old was additionally charged with “third-degree assault as a hate crime.”

A 28-year-old white bus monitor, who allegedly watched the assault take place and did nothing to stop or prevent it, was also charged with “three counts of endangering the welfare of a child” in the attack. The two girls and their families will have their cases handled in family court, while the bus monitor was ordered to appear in Gouverneur Town Court at a later date. Officials were reportedly unable to say whether the victim sought medical treatment for her injuries. “It is probably the most professionally devastating event since I started working at Gouverneur in 1984,” the superintendent of the Gouverneur Central School District, Lauren French, told WWNY.