A 13-year-old Montessori student was mobbed by a group of parents as they egged on a classmate beating the teen — a horrifying incident caught on video last week outside the Yonkers school, legal papers claim.
Now the teenager’s mother, Alenna Merritt, has pulled her daughter out of Yonkers Montessori Academy and filed a legal notice of claim alerting the city of Yonkers that she plans to sue for $40 million over the alleged negligent supervision.
“I felt confused and scared — they kept yelling in my face,” the teen told The Post during a phone interview with her, her mother and lawyer. “When I got attacked, I was feeling alone and scared because nobody was there to help me.”
Merritt’s daughter, whose name is being withheld at the family’s request and will be referred to by her initials, E.W., was swarmed by four parents and a grandparent of other students on the baseball field on school grounds at the pre-K-12 Montessori at 7:20 a.m. April 18, according to the mother, the claim and video footage from three phones.
The family’s lawyer, Mark Shirian, said it appeared from the video that the group was looking for E.W.’s friend for some reason and because the pal wasn’t there, it was a guilt-by-association situation, and they went after E.W. instead.
The parents can be heard in the footage yelling and swearing at E.W. before another student rushes her and starts slapping and pummeling her while the parents look on and E.W. attempts to defend herself by slapping back.
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,” according to the notice of claim filed Thursday with the city of Yonkers.
The teen “was viciously assaulted, beaten, and as a result has sustained severe physical, emotional, and psychological injuries,” reads the document, the legal precursor to filing a lawsuit against a municipal agency.
Merritt, 42, of Yonkers told The Post that she is pressing charges against the adults involved, also.
She said that after reviewing cell-phone videos with the cops, who were called to school that day, the police were able to see that some of the adults also attacked her daughter and have issued a warrant for the arrest of at least one of them.
A joint rep for the Yonkers Police Department and Yonkers Public Schools confirmed that police issued an arrest warrant for Nancy Rosa, 55, on charges of third-degree assault, second-degree harassment and endangering the welfare of a child.
Rosa does not work for the schools, the representative said.
The investigation is ongoing, the rep said, declining to comment on whether further arrests could be expected.
Merritt said that when she got the call from her daughter around 7:30 a.m. that day, shortly after sending her off to school on the bus, she was “horrified” that this could have happened to her kid.
“I had my child screaming on the phone, screaming that she was hit … and I couldn’t even fathom it,” said Merritt, an executive director at a daycare center.
Merritt said her daughter is now receiving schooling remotely from a tutor — in a program provided by the Yonkers Montessori Academy — for the last roughly 40 days of the school year, since the mom said she wouldn’t dream of returning E.W. to the school, fearing for her safety.
E.W. has already been accepted to a private all-girls catholic school for the next school year.
Merritt filed a prior notice of claim against the same school in January alleging that staff sexually harassed E.W. by asking her to pull her bra and shake her breasts — believing she was hiding a vape on her person, the claim papers show.
Merritt said that with this second incident, she thought, “Here we go again.
“We have children who are not being supervised and not being protected,” Merritt told The Post. “I’m not going to put her in harm’s way and put her in the lion’s den every day.”
Merritt and her lawyer Shirian said they wonder if school security and staffers intentionally did not intervene in last week’s fight in retaliation for the pending claim against the school.
Shirian said Merritt and her daughter are “rightfully traumatized by this ordeal” and called for the school to swiftly implement “decisive action to rectify this situation and to prevent such incidents from happening in the future.
“This egregious failure to ensure the safety of students is utterly unacceptable,” Shirian told The Post.
The attack allegedly took place at the teen’s school April 18, just after she got off the morning school bus.Matthew McDermott
The lawyer said his clients may consider bringing legal action against the parents involved as well, but likely not until after the criminal investigation and any resulting criminal cases are over.
The latest notice of claim 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.
The older notice of claim names many of the same defendants.
Rosa and a rep for the city, Yonkers BOE and the Montessori school did not return Post requests for comment.
