Teenager attacked by three students on Sinaloa Middle School campus, angering parents

• A girl was attacked by three other girls at Sinaloa Middle School
• A disturbing video shows the moment a gang of teenagers repeatedly beat her
• The girl and another teenager were injured and eight others were arrested

A teenager was attacked by three students on the campus of a California middle school, angering concerned parents.

A video of the brutal brawl showed a young girl in gray pants being beaten to the ground by a group of students at Sinaloa Middle School in Novato on Friday.

Eight girls between the ages of 12 and 14 were arrested in connection with the fight, the Marin Independent Journal reported. Two students sustained injuries.

Parents said this was not the first time such a violent attack had occurred on school premises and that school officials had not adequately investigated previous incidents.

“A fight is one thing. When someone is attacked by a group of people, it has to be handled in a certain way. And I feel like the school has turned its attention to that and downplayed it,” Jim McAlpine, the father of one of the students, told KTVU.

The video shows the moment the brutal brawl breaks out. A girl, dressed in grey pants and a black hoodie, is punched in the face by another girl before two other women intervene.

In another clip, the three girls are still lying on top of the student when a male student intervenes and apparently tries to end the situation.

As he does so, a student wearing a bright orange backpack moves toward the brawl along with another student while the screams of a large crowd can be heard in the background.

In an email about the incident, Sinaloa Middle School principal Christy Stocker said students knew about the impending fight the day before and that the second student was injured when she tried to intervene.

“Yesterday, the news had apparently spread among the students that this fight would take place during the lunch break,” wrote Stocker.

“This led to a mass panic among our students (several hundred in number), who streamed across campus to watch the fight.”

She added that the “mob” of students ran across campus, causing others to fall and “literally get overrun by others.”

The principal added: “Please be aware that severe consequences have been imposed on students who have caused physical harm to other students.”

Novato Police Sergeant Alan Bates told the Marin Independent Journal that the eight students were arrested and booked into the Marin County Juvenile Detention Center on suspicion of conspiracy to commit a crime and aggravated assault.

On Wednesday, officials at the juvenile detention center said some of the unnamed students were still in custody, while others had already been released.

The two students, whose names were not released, suffered minor injuries and were treated at a nearby hospital before being released, Bates said.

On Tuesday, more than 200 parents of Sinaloa Middle School students gathered for a community meeting in the school library and spoke with Stocker and a team of administrators from the Novato Unified School District.

During the meeting, parents of the two injured teenagers said their children were physically fine but emotionally shaken, the Marin Independent Journal reported.

Julie Synyard, executive director of educational services at Novato Unified, said, “We are doing everything we can to keep our children safe.”

Stocker told parents that the school would ban the use of cell phones to record videos unless they sent the footage anonymously to the STOPit app, which in turn would be forwarded directly to police.

“From now on, any filming on campus will have severe consequences,” Stocker added.

After the forum, McAlpine said, “I feel like the school is trying to address the issue in a non-direct way.”

“So they don’t want to make a lot of confessions and they try not to say a lot of things. I think it’s important to them, but their reputation is much more important to them.”

McAlpine told KTVU that his daughter “doesn’t like going to school some days. Going to school as a sixth-grader with anxiety is a big, big problem,” McAlpine added.

Gina, the mother of one of the students, said: “We have boys who volunteered information. They helped, but in today’s society you can’t do that because they were afraid of getting into trouble themselves.”

Bates said police are currently investigating the motive behind the mass brawl, which he described as “schoolyard tensions.”