Video shows security guard slamming Metro East high school student

By Deion Broxton

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    CAHOKIA HEIGHTS (KMOV) — Some Metro East parents are outraged after cell phone video showed a school security guard body slamming a student.

A student sent News 4 video of the security guard slamming the student outside of Cahokia High School Monday. News 4 tried making contact with the teen seen in the video, as well as his family, but they haven’t responded.

“This is not the first time this happened,” said Megan Harper, a parent who has two students at Cahokia High School. “They did the exact same thing to my son. They grabbed him by his jacket and ripped it off of him. They’re supposed to be trained to diffuse the situation.”

Harper said the school suspended her son for a fight on school grounds. She told News 4 she requested surveillance footage from the principal but still hasn’t seen it.

“He called me back later that day and said he looked at the video and that he didn’t see any harm preceded to my child, and I’m just like ‘how can you say this when I had other parents calling me and telling me you need to get up because they’re roughing your son up?’” Harper added.

“If the families are seeing the same thing happening over and over with different kids then you got to start wondering what’s the solution because the current solution isn’t working,” said Debra Mize, director of a nonprofit called Join Me at the Table. “The kid wasn’t aggressively acting out towards the guard, and the guard was much bigger.”

Mize has spent decades working with Metro East students on violence intervention, including at Cahokia High School.

News 4 has made multiple requests for an in-person interview with someone from the Cahokia School District. Officials provided a statement on the video.

The statement reads:

“We are aware of the incident that occurred in relation to a student and our security guard. As a part of our investigation, it was determined that the security guard acted in accordance with required procedures based on the student’s actions which were not seen on video.”

The district didn’t explain what led up to the incident.

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