In Syracuse, New York, at least 11 high school students are wanted for kidnapping five younger lacrosse players. They have 48 hours to turn themselves in or face serious charges of kidnapping. The district attorney says the situation “goes way beyond hazing.”
Younger members of Westhill High School’s lacrosse team were hazed or played a prank on by a group of students who decided “they were going to haze or play some sort of prank,” Onondaga County District Attorney William Fitzpatrick said at a news conference on Tuesday. The incident happened last Thursday evening.
Superintendent of the Westhill Central School District Stephen Dunham said Tuesday that the rest of the senior boys’ lacrosse season has been cancelled. Dunham said, “We must address the culture of the program, and the most appropriate way to do that is with a reset.” Most of the team wasn’t involved in the incident and didn’t know about the plans ahead of time.
The Onondaga County Sheriff’s Office named five victims. Fitzpatrick said that one of the students was taken to a remote part of the county when people dressed in black and carrying what looked like at least one handgun and one knife came out of the woods.
The group put a sack over the student’s head, tied him up, and threw him in the trunk of a car. They then left him in the woods in the southern part of the county, according to the district attorney.
“He was finally sent back home.” Fitzpatrick said, “There was a time when he thought he was going to be left alone in the middle of nowhere.” “You can hear that some of them found it funny,” he said, referring to a videotape of the event that was found during the probe.
“I saw the video of what happened to that young man.” It is not a major event. It’s not a small thing. “What happened to this young man will stay with me for a long time,” Fitzpatrick said. He told me the plan was to lie to the student after the lacrosse game and say they were going to McDonald’s and then take him home.
He said that the driver of the car said he was lost in a remote part of the county before the “accountants jumped out of the woods pretending to be kidnappers.”
The young people who were hurt in the case and their parents no longer have the power to decide whether to press charges, the district attorney said. His words were, “This case will be prosecuted and dealt with in a normal way.”
If that happened, they wouldn’t have to pay bail, would be given back to their parents, and their case would be heard in family court. If they are too old for family court, Fitzpatrick said, “you will end this situation without a criminal conviction and a criminal record.”
At the news conference, the district attorney talked to at least 11 people who were thought to be involved in the event. He told them that they could turn themselves in to the sheriff’s department for 48 hours and face the misdemeanour crime of unlawful imprisonment.
The district attorney said, “Trust me, the men and women of the Onondaga County Sheriff’s Department are going to identify you if you don’t—if you’re tougher than me, you’re a gambler and you’re going to play the odds, you don’t think you’re going to get caught.”
“You will be arrested, charged as an adult, and possibly charged with the second degree of kidnapping, which is a very, very serious felony.”
That’s because hazing is “strictly prohibited” in the Westhill Central School District, Dunham said Tuesday. “Hazing is a bad thing to do.” “It can be embarrassing and degrading, and it could hurt you physically and emotionally,” he said.
In a message to the community on Monday, Dunham said that the school district’s leaders “immediately” started a probe and told the police about the incident that happened off-campus involving several of their students.
He told Dunham that she “cannot comment or share specific details about student discipline.”
Fitzpatrick said at the news conference that rumours about what happened have “gone completely out of control.”
In the same way, Dunham said that “questions, answers, and rumours about what happened have been all over social media and community gossip,” while the district is “handling the active investigation with an abundance of care.”
“I hope that the time needed to do a full and accurate investigation to make things right doesn’t come across as the ‘district doing nothing,'” Dunham’s message went on.
A school security officer first told the sheriff’s office about the incident, which then gave the criminal investigation to the district attorney on Tuesday morning, according to Onondaga County Undersheriff Jeffrey Passino.
The DA told the parents of the students who might not turn themselves in that if the sheriff’s office puts as much time and effort into the case as they would into a murder case, “Then don’t come crying to me two weeks from now and say, ‘You charged my little baby with kidnapping.'” Yes, that’s right. A lot of my attorneys can win cases that are caught on video.