A Black mother plans a $40 million lawsuit against the city of Yonkers after her 13-year-old daughter was attacked at school by a group of parents who instigated a fight between the girl and one of their relatives, also a student — leading to a harrowing brawl that has since gone viral on social media.
Days after the fight, Alenna Merritt said she took her child out of Yonkers Montessori Academy and filed legal papers that put the city on notice about the coming lawsuit, claiming the school was negligent and didn’t properly supervise the students, which could have prevented the melee.
The legal notice of claim, delivered to the city of Yonkers on April 25, is a formal notification of a lawsuit before it’s filed against a municipal agency.
Merritt’s action alleges negligent supervision, negligent hiring, negligent infliction of emotional distress, and other related accusations against Yonkers, the Yonkers Board of Education, and Yonkers Montessori Academy.
For Merritt, this was not her first negative experience with the academy after she previously filed a notice of legal claim in January, alleging that school staff sexually harassed her daughter by asking her to remove her bra and shake her breasts, suspecting she was hiding a vape.
Four months later, the harassment claim is still pending.
Merritt said that when the fight involving her daughter happened in mid-April, she thought to herself, “Here we go again.”
“We have children who are not being supervised and not being protected,” Merritt told The New York Post. “I’m not going to put her in harm’s way and put her in the lion’s den every day.”
The 42-year-old Yonkers mother also said she plans to pursue criminal and potential civil charges against the adults involved while the incident remains under police investigation.
After reviewing cellphone videos, investigators determined that some of the adults also attacked Merritt’s daughter, leading to an arrest warrant being issued for 55-year-old Nancy Rosa, who was allegedly one of the parents who came to the school on April 18 to pummel the underage girl, police said.
She faces charges of third-degree assault, second-degree harassment, and endangering the welfare of a child.
The Yonkers Police Department has not said whether more arrests are forthcoming.
The fight scene was so violent that police had to be called to the school to squash the donnybrook.
The girl who was targeted, a minor identified by only her initials E.W., said she was jumped by at least five adult relatives when another girl rushed her on the baseball field at the pre-K-12 Montessori right before classes started.
One of the attackers is reportedly a grandparent of the other student involved.
“I felt confused and scared — they kept yelling in my face,” the teen told The New York Post during an interview alongside the family’s attorney. “When I got attacked, I was feeling alone and scared because nobody was there to help me.”
One particular video of the incident circulating on the platform X shows Merritt’s daughter getting waylaid by a much larger girl, who overwhelmed E.W. with a series of wild, over-handed slaps to the head. While some of the spectators are egging the fight on, at least one person can be heard screaming, “Stop! Stop!”
According to the claim, the group of adults came to the school looking for a fight and had intended to find a friend of E.W.’s, but since that person wasn’t there, they turned their wrath on E.W. instead, Merritt’s lawyer, Mark Shirian, explained.
Shirian questioned whether school security staff deliberately chose not to step in during the fight as retaliation against Merritt for her other pending claim against the school.
He said Merritt and her daughter have been “traumatized by this ordeal” and urged the school to take “decisive action to rectify this situation and to prevent such incidents from happening in the future.”
Shirian accused the Montessori of an “egregious failure to ensure the safety of students,” calling it “utterly unacceptable.”
In the video, the parents can be heard yelling and cussing at E.W. before another student attacks suddenly, hitting E.W. repeatedly as the adults encourage the beating, and E.W. attempts to defend herself by slapping back.
According to the preliminary legal claim, E.W. “was left unsupervised” and “violently assaulted on the premises of Yonkers Montessori Academy by students and parents and relatives of current students, during school hours.”
The teen “was viciously assaulted, beaten, and as a result has sustained severe physical, emotional, and psychological injuries,” the document states.
Merritt said she was “horrified” when she received the call from her daughter around 7:30 a.m., crying that she had been roughed up moments earlier by a group of angry parents.
Merritt’s daughter is now enrolled in remote learning and will receive help from a tutor for the remainder of the school year.
Merritt said she does not plan to send E.W. back to the school, fearing for her safety, and revealed that the girl had already been accepted into a private all-girls catholic school, where she’ll attend school next year.
