Two coaches and the athletic director overseeing track at Bronx Science have been suspended after three team members were accused of sexually hazing one of their peers. In an email obtained by the Daily News, the athletic director overseeing the track team, Marion Dietrich, instructed her staff in March 2012 to watch over the boy's locker room because of prior reports of hazing. “You might have heard about an incident, that took place 2 yrs ago, in the boys locker room,” Dietrich wrote. The principal found out about it last Friday and is very concerned about the students’ safety during the changing periods. A student’s genitals were touched from an athlete on the track team.”
Dietrich added, “This very student has been in therapy ever since.” Her email instructed coaches to make themselves familiar fixtures in the locker rooms to deter the sort of behavior alleged in the most recent case, in which the three students, 16-year-old Thomas Brady, 16-year-old Boubacar Diallo, and 17-year-old Pier Berkmans, are charged with sodomizing an underclassman through his clothes.
Marion Dietrich (Facebook)
According to the criminal complaint, one of the defendants allegedly said, "You need a good fingering, you freshman." In another incident, a defendant allegedly threatened to rape the victim if he refused to touch his penis.
Aisha Bruce, the head track coach, and assistant track coach Cesar Garcia are the other school employees who are suspended. Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott said that the three defendants are currently receiving instruction at another school. “We are very concerned about the rush to judgment here,” Steven Banks, the chief of the Legal Aid Society who is representing defendant Thomas Brady, told the Times. “Under our system, these children—and they are just that, children—are entitled to a presumption of innocence.”
New York State is the only state in the country in which 16-year-olds must either be prosecuted as adults, or not at all.
The victim remains at Bronx Science, and a student told the Daily News, "At lunch, he just seemed to joke about it...I don’t know how he’s coping. He just tried to avoid conversation about it.”
The Times also spoke with a 16-year-old student who as an underclassman was a member of the track team, and he said the upperclassmen's hazing sometimes "got out of hand." "Guys would jump on top of each other. It was with and without clothes," he said.
Other students were more blasé. “It was just jokes,” one 18-year-old said. “Maybe it was a little immature. Maybe if you were a freshman you’d get scared. But guys joke around.”
