8-year-old boy pepper sprayed by cops only wanted to kill them "a little."

[Amerigo Vespucci]

LAKEWOOD, Colo. -- The mother of an 8-year-old boy pepper-sprayed by suburban Denver police as he threw a violent tantrum at his elementary school said Wednesday that she wishes authorities had chosen to talk him down instead.

Police in Lakewood say they pepper-sprayed 8-year-old Aidan Elliott twice Feb. 22 at Glennon Heights Elementary School after he refused to drop a piece of wooden wall trim that he was trying to stab them with.

"I wanted to make something sharp, like if they came out, 'cause i was so mad at them," the boy said on NBC's "Today" show. "I was going to try to whack them with it."

Asked on ABC's "Good Morning America" whether he meant it when he told police he wanted to kill them, the boy responded: "A little."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/05/lakewood-police-use-peppe_n_844925.html

[librechik]

1. all the attention he is getting for his misbehavior does not bode well for his future

I'm afraid a little criminal has been made instead of a troubled child receiving help.

[Blue_Tires]

9. his mother is pointing fingers in all the wrong directions, too...

[gratuitous]

18. Crossed our minds, too

Both Mrs. gratuitous and I were watching a clip from the Today Show (The kid's on two morning programs? Really?) and both of us wondered what kind of coping skills Little Marblehead was learning. Mrs. gratuitous spent 25 years teaching and directing child care centers, and one of their constant duties was to teach kids coping skills for when they didn't get their way (as happens to everyone).

To this point, I see Little Marblehead has internalized the lesson that by letting himself go and totally melting down, everything stops and he is the center of attention. Sometimes the cops even come! How thrilling. Okay, there's the pepper spray thing, but other than that, how powerful is he? Now he gets to go on national television! Eight year olds inevitably turn into nine year olds and progress from there. It's well past time for this kid to learn how to deal with disappointment, calm himself down, and figure out for himself what he needs to feel better without hurting himself, hurting someone else, or hurting things. His parents, the school, the police and the networks aren't doing him any favors.

[MineralMan]

2. Look, I'm a grownup man. An 8-year-old with a wooden sword

is no threat to me. I will simply take it away from him. These are big, grown men. They're wearing clothing. Just walk up and grab the stupid piece of molding and take it away. He can't really hurt you with it. How hard can that be?

Silliness.

[JustAnotherGen]

3. My thoughts too

That's why neither my brother nor I can really remember getting spanked by my father! :rofl: His attitude was that as a former Green Beret and Tank Field Commander - if he had to hit his kids? He'd lost control!

Had we done that? He'd have taken it and thrown it and said, "Fetch little pup!" Experienced this myself when I whacked him with one of his wrenches.

Hey! No corporal punishment doesn't mean we weren't Literally treated like misbehaving puppies – when we misbehaved. ;-)

[MineralMan]

4. Yup. For a grown man to have to resort to pepper spray

to disarm an 8-year-old boy is sheer cowardice. You just walk up, take a slight blow from the kid, grab the wooden stick, and take it away. Then you humiliate the kid a little to drive the point home and send him off to his mother.

These cops just weren't using common sense or behaving as adults.

[bobbolink]

52. Very wise father!

:applause: for dad!

[Rex]

5. Your thoughts mirror my own.

I would have taken the 'sword' away from him, like an adult SHOULD DO and punish him AFTER having a long talk about his anger issues and probably setting up some kind of management system for his outbursts. I don't expect a cop to do that, I expect an ADULT to do that out of respect for the child's future.

Ludicrous.

[Blue_Tires]

13. As mentioned in the LBN thread,

I think lawsuit fear played a big role in the school and police policy and how they reacted...Classrooms are a weird place nowadays -- I used to be a substitute, and there were extremely strict guidelines on when I could even lay a finger on a student (essentially only when he/she physically attacks another student)...

And this part I can directly speak to through experience: You can discuss punishments and have long talks with a problem student from morning announcements to dismissal, but it means NOTHING when the kid goes home and enabling parents assure him that he isn't in trouble; he did nothing wrong, and that mommy and daddy will meet with the principal tomorrow and get this whole misunderstanding straightened...

[Rex]

30. That is true if you are in a school district that lets those things slip by.

Which is why you also need a well educated school board.

[proud2BlibKansan]

65. It's true in most school districts

[WatsonT]

21. Do that as a teacher or police officer and you risk a lawsuit

really with the mom having a lawyer on speed dial and apparently having relinquished her parental responsibilities years ago there is no good answer.


In a sane country the teacher would have snatched the stick away, given the kid a few quick swats, then gone back to teaching.

The parent would have been ashamed and would have disciplined the kid when he got home.

The situation would never repeat itself and everyone would be able to receive an education.

We do not live in a sane country.

[MedicalAdmin]

26. I used to be an officer.

I cannot fathom some 8 year old with a stick of wood who can't be taken down without muss or fuss. They aren't fast enough and they aren't sneaky enough and they don't have the cops training....

Pepper spray - deputy Dawg needs a refresher course, IMHO..

[Snoutport]

42. I work with emotionally disturbed kids and have been ATTACKED many times and HURT badly

I think a lot of these comments are based on an unrealistic idea that a kid cannot hurt and adult. I have been attacked with scissors (very scary) and have had a 4th grader sneak up behind me and hit me over the head with a metal chair...and then continue to beat me as I fell to the floor and then tried to protect another student. A chair leg hit me on the groove right along my spine. I have had scissors thrown at me from across the room. My assistants have had their fingers broken, an arm broken and last year a student grabbed by ear and tried to rip it off...it took three adults to get him off of my ear.

Teachers are not allowed to fight back. Police do not want to physically take down a kid. I DO NOT condone the pepper spray...but the problem here is that a student who is obviously out of control has been placed in a room that does not meet his emotional needs. At my school we are multiple trainings every two years on safe holds and ways to keep ourselves and our students safe.

When you are a teacher who is attacked you don't have many options. No matter what you do the rest of the class is watching and it is not healthy for a 2nd grader to see his teacher being hit and beat. My program has had four assistants out this year and in the hospital for injuries.

In my old district one violent kid had a "support plan" that said, "the student can swing at the teacher 300 times" and then I had permission to pin him to the ground. EVERY day my assistant would count and at 300 I would pin him to the ground...and stay there for most of the day. The district would give me no extra help to deal with him (and this classroom went through 5 teachers in ONE school year before I started. The districts would rather just burn out the teachers rather than pay to get the help the kid really needs.

So...there are two sides to this story and there are never easy options when it comes to stopping a violent student. EVERY choice you make looks bad in the news. An adult pinning a kid to the floor looks terrible. An adult ripping a splintered piece of wood out of a kids hand and cutting him looks terrible. Pepper spray looks terrible. A policeman subduing a kid looks terrible.

Pepper spray, a bad option maybe, but it means nobody had to lay a hand on the kid. And, believe me, the last thing a teacher or a cop wants to do is have to lay there hands on a kid.

So, I don't like the pepper spray but we weren't here, we didn't see how violent he was. We don't know how much emotional damage he was causing his teacher and his classmates. There are lots of facets to this story that have to be weighed.

[okieinpain]

44. yeah then you get sued for taking it away from him. can't win. n/t.

[Paradoxical]

6. Why didn't they just step out of the way when he came at them?

Seriously, it's an 8 year old.

[MineralMan]

7. Because they don't teach common sense and proportional response

in cop school, I think.

If there are any grown men reading this, tell us if you'd be afraid of an 8-year-old with a stick.

[Paradoxical]

8. I'm a grown man. 5'9'' 150 lbs. Any 8 year old does not scare me.

[Rex]

11. I'm 6' 280 lbs and if the day came that I was scared of an 8 year old

with a stick...is the day I seek professional help.

Why didn't they just stomp his little ass into the ground and handcuff him by force? :sarcasm:

[Blue_Tires]

19. Not disagreeing with you, but I think it is worth mentioning

that if you decide to use physical means to settle him down, "proportional response" without injuring him can possibly get murky, especially if he escalates the resistance...

Case in point: I'm overlooking four elementary classes outside at recess, and one autistic 4th-grader loses it and starts raining punches on everyone around him. I grab him, separate him from the others and pull him to the far side of the playground by his shoulders (he is struggling against me all this time like a trapped wolverine). Eventually I get the attention of another teacher, and tell her to go to the office and bring out the 'special needs' professional. The kid still wants to bomb on his entire class, and just to add gas to the fire, some of the girls are teasing him from across the field...

I probably had to restrain this kid for about 6-8 minutes before the specialist came. In that time he:

1. Bit and scratched my arms and hands, so now we're doing this dance where I'm moving my grasp from one place to another trying to anticipate him

2. Goes ragdoll limp and kicks me repeatedly

3. Tries to elbow me in the stomach but of course I get it in the crotch

4. Repeatedly tries to escape anytime I relax my grip, including quickly slipping out of his jacket when I was still holding him by the shoulder

Of course I'm a big guy and he was never going to get away from me long enough to start scrappin' again, but in the back of my mind I was *VERY* scared because as a substitute I'd had no experience with this situation, and was worried about guesstimating the proper amount of strength needed to restrain him (without getting into trouble myself), especially since I had to use more everytime he did one of his stunts...

[MedicalAdmin]

27. Ii used to be a teacher and I used to be an officer.

ANd I can tell you that teachers are not trained in the force continuum while cops are. I get what you are saying, and it is kinda tricky but what a cop can do and what teachers can do are 2 different worlds. Sprayin a kid? For a stick? Nah.

It would have been real easy to get the kid to swing and then follow through with your arm that matched his non leading arm and simply pull the stick away at the end of the swing by grabbing on and twisting your hips. It's not hard. I've done it to full adult assholes with attitudes, a baseball bat and a snootful. And usually in that moment of astonishment there is a chance to talk the little buggers down. ...

Of course we weren't there and maybe they tried less agressive approaches, but I gotta tell ya. Back when I was in uniform I would NEVER want to be known as the guy who had to gas a kid. Fucking humiliating.

[Snoutport]

43. That is my day EVERYDAY!!! Sp Ed teacher here...i've been hit, bit, scratched, stabbed at and my

poor crotch has been hit and kicked so many times I probably can't have kids now!! Lol...they ALWAYS go for the crotch!!!

[Shiver]

64. That depends.

How big is the stick, and have I left my balls at home for the day?

[JitterbugPerfume]

55. because it was a school room

full of kids, all of whom could have been in jeopardy?

[Modern_Matthew]

10. Another mishandled situation by the police? I'm sure glad these are isolated incidents. nt

[slackmaster]

12. The mother this, the mother that, the mother blah blah blah

Where is the boy's father?

[Maru Kitteh]

17. Who cares? I don't care if the boy had three daddies or two mommies or just this

pathetic attention-seeking enabler of a parent.

It is the job of whatever parent(s) is at hand to provide structure and discipline and get the child the help he needs.

[slackmaster]

23. I have found, in 53 years of life experience, that men can be better than women at teaching...

...certain life skills to boys.

[Maru Kitteh]

61. anecdote is not evidence

[pipi_k]

14. Well, people can say they're not afraid of a little kid with a stick...

who's out of control, but I do have a question...

What if it takes one or two cops to try and subdue the kid and grab the stick and he goes off and tries to run away and ends up falling with the stick and impaling himself with it?

No doubt people would be blaming the cops for not doing something different.

OK, so the alternate scenario didn't happen, and there's no way to tell whether it would have. Probable? Who knows? Possible? Yes.

But I'm sure that alternative was considered, and a shot of pepper spray considered the lesser of two evils.

[MineralMan]

15. The kid is a second-grader. You just walk up, grab the stupid stick,

twist it out of his hot little hand and take it away from him. How hard is that? The worst that could happen is you get poked or hit by the stick. No harm.

Pepper spray is way overkill for the situation, for pete's sake. A second-grader. Weighs about 50 pounds. How much harm can he do, even if he's throwing a tantrum?

[pipi_k]

31. Apparently people have forgotten

how fast kids can be.

It's all fine and dandy to say, "Just walk up and take the stick away", but really it's not that easy if the kid is agitated.

The danger, as I pointed out, isn't that he'd stab one of the officers with it. The danger would be that he makes a sudden move and hurts himself. Maybe trips and falls in an effort to get away and impales himself.

Even a small child can be quite a handful when he's agitated/enraged. All that adrenaline flowing around in him is going to maybe make him as hard to handle as a full grown adult.

I have a friend who adopted two of her grandchildren because their mom was a druggie who couldn't care for them. The boy had serious anger issues. I mean, SERIOUS. He is as sweet-faced as that kid, but has gotten frighteningly violent to the point where a grown adult could not subdue him. Both my friend, and the boy, have been injured during the scuffles. And these scuffles started happening when the kid was very young.

So if that kid in the article got injured in a scuffle, again, like I said, the rant du jour here would be Police-Abuse-On-a-Little-Kid.

[DefenseLawyer]

16. Maybe he was on PCP like Rodney King.

Can't be too careful.

[tabasco]

22. LOL!

Good one.

[pipi_k]

33. that's not even funny

Like I posted above, I have a friend whose adopted grandson has serious emotional issues and acts out in violent anger sometimes.

His mom took drugs while she was pregnant with him, then when he was just a toddler, abused him and his sister. Both kids are screwed up. The mom took the little girl's hand and put it on a hot stove burner during a visitation one day.

To see the birth mom, one would think she's perfectly sane and normal...just like the mom of that kid.

One never knows what goes on at home.


So really, that comment about PCP wasn't even amusing.

[DefenseLawyer]

45. The comment was a reference to police excuses for using excessive force.

One of the reasons given by the LAPD as to why it was necessary for 4 officers to use a taser on King and then hit him 56 times with their nightsticks was that he was on PCP and therefore had "super human strength". Of course toxicology reports revealed no traces of PCP in Mr. King's system. Sorry to hear about your friend.

[pipi_k]

47. OK thanks for the explanation... n/t

[JI7]

20. the cops should not have sprayed him but his parents seem to be a problem also

they should have taught him that what he did was wrong . it wasn't ok how they responded but he was still wrong.

and it seems like she isn't finding any fault with him.

[slackmaster]

24. He apparently has only one functioning parent

At least one who is present.

[MedicalAdmin]

28. When I was growing up....

(wait a minute - GET OFF MY LAWN YOU DAMN KIDS) Ahem.

if I got into trouble like this (and I did - lots and worse too) my dad had a simple philosophy. Whatever I got at school or whereever, I would get twice as worse from him when I got home.

Or he gave me the option of letting my mom decide my fate. I only made that mistake once.... I let dad beat sense into my head after that. It hurt less.

[Blue_Tires]

54. To add my own 'get off my lawn' perspective:

I wasn't the best behaved at that age, but none of my teachers ever had to dial 911, either... Even if I did do something to bring the cops in, my parents in a million years wouldn't have gone on the local news, much less GMA to complain...

Even now, I spoke to my mom (who always watches GMA) about it, and she said the police overreaction doesn't excuse the mother's failures as a parent...

[MedicalAdmin]

56. YOur mom's a sharp cookie.

[Matariki]

51. The very fact that they are dragging him around to TV shows proves it.

And certainly they don't seem to be looking in the right direction of where the problem lies.

[proud2BlibKansan]

25. There is a larger question here everyone seems to be avoiding

DO YOU WANT THIS CHILD IN CLASS WITH YOUR CHILDREN?

I've taught plenty of kids like this. They prevent an entire class, and sometimes an entire school, from learning.

This 8 year old child ripped a piece of trim off the wall and was trying to hurt (maybe even kill) police officers with it. Now if he would do harm to a cop, how long do you think he'd stop to think about harming a classmate - YOUR child?

How much raw strength - driven by adrenalin - does it take to rip a piece of trim off the wall?

And so I ask - do you really want a kid like this in your child's class?

[MedicalAdmin]

29. Nope.

Absolutely not. He belongs in the principals office, with a flamethrower.

[pipi_k]

35. Actually I thought the same thing...

My friend's adopted grandson (whom I mention somewhere above) tried to drown his cousin in a backyard swimming pool.

He's attacked people.

What's sad is that the doctors have tried every medication they could think of and nothing helped.

He went away to a sort of "boot camp" for a while and did well for a bit but when he got out he's right back to the violent behavior.

He's about 13 now, and my friend finally had to admit defeat and send him back to his mom (the druggie) because her health is not good.

I fully expect to hear that the kid has murdered someone before he turns 18.


I would NOT want my children around a kid who could hurt or kill them. I feel sorry for the kid (in the article) because he looks like a sweetheart and probably doesn't really want to be violent, but what can you do....

[tammywammy]

39. I gotta say, I've been taking down trim in my how

With a freaking wonderbar it's still a PITA, I cannot imagine physically ripping it off the wall.

[pipi_k]

40. Exactly...that kid was operating

on pure adrenaline, it seems, and, as such, was extremely dangerous.

Maybe not to a grown man (although you never can tell) but at the very least to himself.


I think one positive thing that comes from this is that his case might now get more attention and perhaps he and his mother might be able to get the help they both desperately need.

[Mariana]

41. Even if he doesn't physically harm them

they must be terrified of him. Every day. All the time. My guess is that doesn't make for a wonderful learning environment.

Kids need to feel safe, and BE safe, in school.

[Biker13]

57. Great Point!

God, look at what we expect our teachers to deal with these days! I'm sure she got into teaching because she loved it, and wanted to help shape the next generation. Instead, she's confronted with this!

May not be PC, but I'm so grateful to my parents for sending me and my siblings to private school. We never saw anything even close to this.

Biker's Old Lady

[Ignis]

60. That's not the "larger question"; this is:

Do we want to live in a democratic society that finds it acceptable (even laudable, from some responses seen on DU to this incident) for adult LEOs to pepper-spray 8-year-old children?

[seabeyond]

32. i am ok with it. wash eyes out, put him in counselling and test the kid

to see what is up.

this is not even kinda normal behavior for a kid.

[HEyHEY]

34. Yeah, but at the same time, I don't think it's normal for a cop to be that scared of a kid

[seabeyond]

36. kids are pretty unpredictable. working hard for them not to get hurt

and with a weapon, not get hurt yourself. if he didnt have a weapon, that would be one thing.

the pepper spray washes out. if they had tased, over the line and i would have issue

on edit: i have been dealing with a smart mouth 13 yr old for a couple weeks... lol. my line is short

[seabeyond]

38. oh, and

congrats

i loved your pictures. wishin you the best.... forward

[HEyHEY]

46. Thanks!

:)

[JonLP24]

62. It is not soluble in water

Water will not wash it out, you're encouraged to blink repeatedly. Rubbing the affected area will irritate and prolong the effects.

[JoePhilly]

37. I saw him and his mother on one of the morning shows the other day ...

... and the kid is very dangerous.

He was looking for "something sharp" to use to stab his teachers. He flat out says he wanted to hurt them. And the police too.

You can't tell what is wrong with him, but I would not want this kid anywhere near my 9 year old daughter.

It would be no problem for him to get a knife from home and kill some one.

He's fortunate that all he got was pepper sprayed.

[otohara]

48. Police Were Called

two other times to deal with this kid.

Kid needs help.

[JoePhilly]

53. Yup, I noticed that this isn't the first time too.

Can you imagine if this time (the 3rd time) the kid had brought a knife from home and stabbed an unsuspecting teacher of a classmate?

Everyone would be screaming about all of the "warning signs". Now that he got pepper sprayed, the cry is "police abuse".

Hopefully, this episode will be the one that causes some one to take action.

[Shagbark Hickory]

49. This little monster made it on GMA?! WTF!?

[Matariki]

50. Why the HELL is this kid on Good Morning America?!

WTF is up with our public discourse? Throw a temper tantrum, act insane, get on national television? Idiocracy!

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

59. .

[Fire Walk With Me]

58. As opposed to Paul Rubens' vampire character in the film "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"

in which he says, "Kill them very much"?

:rofl:

[Rex]

63. Whatever happen to taking control over a situation?