In a school fight between two untrained kids, you get suspensions. Everybody's in trouble, everybody's parents are mad, and in three weeks it's over.
In a fight where one participant has forty-one amateur bouts and a national title, the other kid's family gets a lawyer. And that lawyer's entire case, from day one, was three words.
Trained. Second. Punch.
Halstead has a zero-tolerance policy on physical altercations, which means everybody involved gets the same thing regardless of who started it, which is a policy that exists so administrators never have to make a judgment call.
Ten days out-of-school for both of us, effective immediately, pending a hearing.
He got ten days he spent at his uncle's lake house. I got ten days that my mother had to figure out, because I could not be alone in an apartment for ten days for reasons that had nothing to do with the fight and everything to do with the fact that our upstairs neighbor's boyfriend had been in a bad phase and my mother did not trust that hallway.
She lost three shifts.
Three shifts is one hundred and eighty-eight dollars. I want to put the number in here because everybody wants the part where the girl knocks out the linebacker and nobody wants the part where the electric bill moves.
The video went up that night.
There were forty-one phones in that circle. Forty-one. I know the number because I eventually saw all of them.
The one that traveled was eleven seconds long. It starts about a half-second before the shove and it ends when he hits the floor.
It does not contain me asking him to move. It does not contain "kneel down and apologize." It does not contain the four minutes before.
Eleven seconds of a small girl in a hoodie hitting a linebacker twice.
By Sunday it had ninety thousand views. By the following Friday it was somewhere over four million and it had been reposted with about eleven different captions, most of which described a person I have never been.
I did not post it. I have never posted anything about any of this and this is the first time in five years I have written a word about it.
Monday morning, Brody Cade's family retained a lawyer named Marcus Whitlock, and Marcus Whitlock sent a letter to my mother's apartment, and my mother read it at the kitchen table at seven forty in the morning after an eight-hour shift and did not understand about a third of it.
It said they were considering civil action and a criminal complaint for battery.
It said the words "trained combatant" twice.
It said that Brody had sustained a jaw injury and a concussion and that his athletic future was in question.
My mother put that letter down and looked at me and said, in Ukrainian, the only thing she said about the whole matter for three days.
She said, "Anna. What do we do."
And I did not have anything.
🔥 Comment below and I'll tell you what was on the other forty videos. 👇
PART 3
Ruben Sifuentes found us a lawyer.
I had not spoken to Ruben in two years. Not out of anger — out of the specific cowardice of a fifteen-year-old who could not walk into a gym she was not allowed to train in.
He called our landline on Tuesday. My mother answered. I stood in the kitchen and listened to her say "yes" eleven times.
Then she handed me the phone and Ruben said, "Third row, second from the left. It's still there. Come get in my truck at nine tomorrow."
The lawyer was a woman named Solange Pettigrew who does juvenile work and school discipline in Sedgwick County and who had been a public defender for fourteen years before that. She took it for a number that Ruben covered part of and that I did not learn until I was nineteen.
She said four things in the first meeting and I've never forgotten any of them.
One: stop talking. To everybody. No statements, no interviews, no comment threads. Two: do not delete anything. Three: your training is a fact and we are not going to hide it, we are going to explain it. Four: get me every video.
That last one was the whole case.
Here's how we got them, and it wasn't clever, it was just work.
Ruben and I made a list of every kid we could identify in the circle from the frames of the videos already public. Forty-one phones, but we could name about twenty-six faces.
Solange sent a preservation letter to the school and to the district. My mother and I wrote — by hand, at the kitchen table, over two nights — twenty-six letters to twenty-six families, which Solange edited down to a paragraph and which said, essentially: your child recorded an incident that is now the subject of a legal proceeding involving a seventeen-year-old. Please do not delete it. Here is my lawyer's email.
Nine families responded.
Nine videos, from nine angles, and four of them started before the shove.