6
4
The father of an Illinois high school student who brandished a knife during a cafeteria brawl, prompting a police officer to shoot her with a tazer, said that his daughter had enough of being constantly bullied.
The shocking footage that went viral on social media shows a 15-year-old girl and her cousin engaged in a fight with about five other girls in the Peoria High School cafeteria, according to the Journal Star.
In the footage, the daughter is seen being beaten while she is on the ground by a group of students.
A police officer and other staff are seen trying to break up the fight.
The girl then walks toward her school bag and pulls out a knife.
The clip shows the girl standing on a cafeteria table and then falling backward and hitting the ground after apparently she was shot with a stun gun.
The girl's father, Milton Chappel, Jr, said that his daughter suffered a large bump on her head.He said that school officials were aware that his daughter had complained that other students were bullying her, yet they did not do enough to prevent the brawl.
'When you tell somebody what's going on and nothing happens, it gets old,' Chappell told the Journal Star.
'You get tired of it.'
Peoria school officials said that they were never asked to prevent bullying against Chappel's daughter.
The girl's cousin said that Chappell's daughter was attacked first. When the cousin intervened and pulled the attacking girl away, she, too, was attacked.
Chappell said he did not know why his daughter brought a knife to school.
He said that his daughter told him that she planned to drop the knife just moments before she was shot with the tazer.
A spokesperson for the school defended the officer's use of a stun gun.
He said that Chappell's daughter refused to drop the knife and that she posed a danger to other students nearby.
The school also said that his daughter had made incendiary posts on Facebook that indicate she was the aggressor in the altercation, an assertion that the family denies.
The identities of the students involved in the fight have not been released.