Teen arrested in rock-throwing
incident
By
BILL HUGHES
whughes@lohud.com
THE JOURNAL NEWS
(Original publication: September 14, 2006)
(Click
here for additional information re Hawthorne Cedar Knolls)
HAWTHORNE — A student at a residential treatment center for troubled
youths has been accused of throwing a rock from a school bus and
hitting the windshield of a minivan driven by a woman who is eight
months' pregnant and had three young children as passengers, police
said.
No injuries were reported, but a
15-year-old student at Hawthorne Cedar Knolls was arrested on a
criminal mischief charge after the incident, which occurred about
3:30 p.m. Tuesday on Frankford Street near Willis Avenue, Police
Chief Louis Alagno said.
"The bus and the vehicle were
traveling in opposite directions when the rock was thrown," Alagno
said. "The woman turned her vehicle around and followed the bus
until she saw a patrol officer and told him what had happened."
The woman had just picked up her
3-year-old daughter and a neighbor's child from a prekindergarten
program and had a 20-month-old child strapped into a car seat in her
2001 Honda Odyssey, said her husband, Denis McCarthy. He said his
wife maintained her composure and brought the vehicle to a stop
without overly alarming the children.
"She calmed them down, and they
asked her, 'What happened mommy?' and she told them, 'It's OK, the
car just got a boo-boo,' " McCarthy said. "Then I guess the
Bronx-Irish kicked in and she turned around and chased the bus."
The rock was about the size of a
child's fist, McCarthy said, and it shattered a small portion of the
windshield but did not pass through it.
The patrol officer flagged down by
McCarthy's wife stopped the bus, and investigators from the
department's youth division interviewed the passengers and
identified a 15-year-old Manhattan resident as the rock-throwing
suspect, Alagno said. He was charged as a juvenile with the
equivalent of fourth-degree criminal mischief and issued an order to
appear in Family Court.
"I'm glad nobody got hurt, but what
makes it so scary is all the stories we've all seen about kids
throwing rocks from overpasses and frozen turkeys through
windshields and that kind of thing," McCarthy said. "I don't even
know if there was a monitor on the bus, but that's something I'm
definitely going to recommend to the school.
"I know they're troubled kids,
disadvantaged kids and some of them have emotional behavior
problems. But the question is, 'Does it go beyond that for some of
them?' " McCarthy said. "That's kind of the other concern that we
have. Thankfully, the incident didn't turn out worse."
Nobody answered the telephone at
Cedar Knolls throughout yesterday afternoon.
|
