Girl, 11, faces felony charge for throwing rock at boy (Fresno, Ca)

[Kadie]

Posted on Fri, Jul. 15, 2005


Girl, 11, faces felony charge for throwing rock at boy

JULIANA BARBASSA

Associated Press


FRESNO, Calif. - An 11-year old girl faces felony assault charges after seeking emergency help for a boy whom she says she accidentally injured after he bullied her with water balloons.

Maribel Cuevas was arrested, handcuffed and taken by police to juvenile hall, where she spent five days with only minimal contact with her parents.

Her family says Maribel meant no harm when she accidentally hit the Elijah Vang, the 9-year-old neighborhood boy, in the forehead with a rock. They say she was simply defending herself after Vang and several other boys pummeled her with water balloons outside her home in a poor Fresno neighborhood in April. Vang's family isn't pressing charges and has since moved away.

Police contend Maribel was the main suspect in a felony assault and they treated her appropriately.

"We responded. We determined a felony assault had taken place and the officers took the actions that were necessary," said Fresno Police Sgt. Anthony Martinez.


more...
http://www.sanluisobispo.com/mld/sanluisobispo/12143349.htm

[MadHound]

1. What happy horseshit this is!

Sounds to me like we've got some powermad, racist cops who decided to take out their bile and belligerence on a little girl. Class act guys, real class act:eyes:

This is kids being kids, and shouldn't have amounted to anything more than parental intervention and apologies. But then these asshole cops had to wade in and make a felony case out of it. What, all other crime in San Luis Obispo is taken care of, and they have nothing else to do than bust kids for being kids.

[noiretextatique]

2. oh for fuck's sake

:eyes:

[ConfuZed]

3. That little chauvinistic piglet deserved alot more than a rock....

...said the freeper-like feminist.

:sarcasm:

[livetohike]

4. Wow! I should have been jailed for the number of rock fights

(wars) and dirt clump battles we had when I was a kid. This is sad. We all got yelled at by parents, but that was it.

[GreenPartyVoter]

5. I got hit in the forhead iwth a rock as a kid. No assault charges were

brought against the kid who did it. (I like to think he lost a lot of sleep over it, though.)

[Nabia2004]

20. Yes, I still feel bad about it

When I was kid I hit the neighbor girl in the head with a rock. The cut required stitches. It was an accident, I meant to hit the ground next to her. I walked her home, and apologized for being stupid. No jail just a lifetime of guilt.

[GreenPartyVoter]

21. I doubt the kid who hit me still feels guilty. But I am sure he did for

quite awhile. I looked like a real mess and had to get stitches and all.

But hey, I didn't die Goliath style. I count that as a plus. :)

[High Plains]

6. Fucking bonehead cops!

We're seeing more and more of this criminalization of everything! Are these people braindead, out of their minds, zombified robots, or what? Do they have a lick of sense?

There's plenty of that attitude on DU, too. Somebody touches somebody else and everyone starts screaming about assault. We are rapidly becoming a nation of chickenshit wussies.

[lumpy]

19. Matters such as this

were handled by the families involved in the long gone days of freedom. The'state'is interfering much too often in cases like this. Our children's lives are being overseen by the police state; parents rights will soon evaporate.

[northzax]

7. who paid for the medical care?

the taxpayers?

[libnnc]

8. To Chuck C.: sorry for punching you in the face in 1981.

There we were in 5th grade, Hazelwood Elementary School. He accidentally knocked off my glasses while horse-playing with another kid. I got in the way.

I freaked out and reached back somewhere in Arkansas and hit him with a helluva hay-maker. He dropped to the ground. Seconds later, we were both carted off to the principal's office. Sitting there waiting for our paddling, Chuck reached over and whispered in my ear, "Hey, you can say I fell over a desk if you want to. It's okay. I'll back you up." Heaven forbid anyone find out that the shiner on his eye was the handiwork of a 70 pound , 11 year old blond girl in a pony tail and glasses.

Felony? I guess they would have put me in leg irons. :shrug:

P. S. I still wear glasses. Don't knock them off...ever. :nuke:

[mdmc]

9. this is cheney's america

and Arnolds californication.

[proud2BlibKansan]

10. My sister should be in Leavenworth then

for all the rocks she threw at kids when we were young.

Is it too late to press charges? She's 50 years old now and still gets on my nerves now and then. :)

[darkism]

11. What a country we live in...

...where we put children in cuffs and charge them with felonies, just for being kids.

Absurd.

[dogday]

12. If this had been enforced when I was a kid

I would of been arrested. My Brother, Sister and I used to fight like crazy with the kids next door and hit and got hit often. We threw rocks all the time at each other and we lived on a military installation....

[tocqueville]

13. you cannot imagine how much that kind of stuff hurts America

even if it doesn't make headlines, it shows up here and there and the common reaction from Europeans is a mix of horror and incomprehension.

The problem is that it belongs to a pattern. Even if the charges are later dismissed, the damage is already done.

[gratuitous]

14. Now if she'd shot him dead in Florida

Maribel could have just said that she thought Elijah might be an unspecified danger at some time in the future, and she would have gone scot-free. Maybe even gotten interviewed by Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh.

Hmmm, now that I think about it, five days in cuffs and juvie hall might be preferable.

[deadparrot]

15. So, she did the responsible thing to go and get help

and she's held and charged for what was obviously an accidental injury to a kid that was bullying her?

Jeez. :crazy"

[bloom]

16. I guess my 7 year old brother should have been charged

with a felony for the dart gun injury to my face that required stitches.

And he wasn't even being confronted by a mob of water balloon throwers. No self-defense claim whatsoever. :shrug:

[doodadem]

17. When I was a kid

physical assault was how you let someone of the opposite sex know you were sweet on them!

But seriously, from what we've seen of the cops in Fresno, and Fresno County Sheriff's Dept., this is par for the course. You're not supposed to defend yourself, even if another person is threatening to cave your head in. There has to be some middle ground between that attitude, and say...what they have in Florida.

[genieroze]

18. I have said this so many times to my husband. If we had the police

and courts sticking thier noses in where it didn't and still doesn't belong, we would have ended up in juvie rather then a spanking.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PAZT/

[montana_hazeleyes]

22. Well, in second grade in the fifties,

a boy was chasing me (how he showed he liked me) and I ran through a door and accidentally knocked over a fellow second grade girl and broke her leg. The worst part is she already had polio! I guess that would get me life in prison now.


Added note, we were great friends though and when we were about 12 and 13 years old we would love to go uptown, with me, the totally healthy one in the seat of the wheelchair and her pushing.
She could walk on her own for awhile but had to use the chair at times. She had one leg much shorter than the other and it was very obvious she had polio. I would push her most the way, then we would change and get the biggest kick out of the way people would look at us. Guess we'd be in trouble now adays for causing people irreparable emotional harm or something.