Modesto Woman Says Granddaughter Was Victim Of Hate Crime, Threatened With Suspension
MODESTO (CBS13) — A Modesto woman says her granddaughter was harassed with racial slurs and attacked at school, and is accusing Modesto Police and the school district of failing to take the case seriously.
Rita Tillery says her granddaughter is a good student who is active with her church and sings in the choir. She said it came because of the color of the girl's skin.
You can see it hurts her deeply every time her granddaughter tells the story.
"It hurt, because I wasn't there to protect my baby," she said.
Nuphaeya Hassen, 12, a student at Modesto's La Loma Junior High says another student came up at the bus stop before school. He was holding sticks like a cross, hurling racial slurs at her.
"Walking towards me saying KKK and Ku Klux Klan, and kept walking towards me," she said.
"She's like, 'Granny, he said something about a head or something,'" Tillery said. "I said 'Skinhead?' and she said, That's it.' She didn't know what a skinhead was."
Hassen says matter of factly that she fought back, slapping the boy after he attacked her, cutting her arm. After school, she says the boy's older sister, a high-school freshman, jumped her around the corner from home.
"Out of nowhere she just grabbed my hair and pulled me to the ground and had me on my back, and was repeatedly hitting me in the head and the face," she said.
Tillery believes Hassen is the victim of a hate crime.
"Back in the '60s and '70s, that's what I had to deal with," she said. "That's what I had to deal with. I didn't think my granddaughter—12 years old—was gonna have to deal with that."
But she says both the Modesto Unified School District and police basically shrugged her off when she reported what happened, and the school district sent home a letter threatening the girl with an in-school suspension.
"They wanted to suspend her for defending herself," Tillery said. "You don't do that. She matters, she's somebody and I want her to be treated like she's somebody."
The school district would only say police are investigating a complaint by a parent and Modesto Police did not return phone calls.
Tillery says the president of the local NAACP is joining her for meetings on Wednesday at the junior high and the high school where the boy's older sister attends. She says the boy and his older sister only received three-day suspensions for what she believes was a hate crime.
