The parent of a New Jersey high school student was jailed after walking into a classroom earlier this week and threatening a student involved in a dispute with his daughter, according to police.
The confrontation, which occurred Monday at Paulsboro High School, was caught on cellphone video that shows a man ordering a teenage boy to apologize to his daughter. The angry father then nearly got into a fistfight with another student, according to the video posted on social media.
The 38-year-old man was charged with two third-degree counts of terroristic threats, along with simple assault, trespassing and disorderly conduct, and jailed on Monday.
The father, a resident of the Gibbstown section of Greenwich Township, was ordered released from jail to await trial during a court hearing Tuesday afternoon. He must maintain monthly contact with court officials and is to have no contact with the students involved in the incident or their families, a judge said. He also is not permitted on school grounds.
The video of the incident appears to show the father being directed to a classroom, then someone knocking on the door. It’s unclear who let the father and the person taking the video into the locked classroom, but the man immediately confronted a male student once inside.
“You got a problem with my daughter?” he asked the teen. “Apologize to my daughter.”
“I didn’t do nothing to her,” the student responded.
“You heard what the f— I said. Apologize to my daughter … Now,” the father said again, his voice getting louder.
The man then confronted another student who spoke to him, according to the video.
It was more than a minute into the two minute and 51 second video before an adult attempted to intervene. A man put his arm on the father’s back and tried to escort him from the room as the parent verbally sparred with the second student, trading vulgar retorts, the video shows.
“If I gotta come up here again, I’m gonna slap fire on both of ya’ll,” the father said as he began to leave the classroom.
One of the students the father confronted then tried to encourage him to fight. The man, who was almost out of the classroom, returned to face the teenager, according to the video. He and the teenager appeared to make physical contact and police allege the father made threats and grabbed the student’s arm.
School officials have not responded to requests to comment on the incident.
The father had come to the school around 11:30 a.m. Monday to sign out his daughter, according to the affidavit of probable cause filed with the charges. His daughter was having a problem with another student over photos that were allegedly shared with others, police said.
Instead of leaving the school after signing out his daughter, the father headed upstairs to the classroom, police said.
The affidavit filed by police states the teacher in the classroom did not have his school radio within reach to communicate with school security and did not want to escalate the issue by reaching for it. Instead, the teacher said he tried to defuse the situation by speaking to the father, according to police.
The school’s head of security was not notified of the incident until the father was already off school grounds, the affidavit noted. Police were dispatched to the school around 2:15 p.m., hours after the incident, according to the affidavit.
Paulsboro police reinstated the School Resource Officer program to add police officers to school buildings just last week, thanks to funding from a grant, Police Chief Gary Kille said Tuesday. But, a police officer was not working in the high school building on Monday when the incident occurred.
The officer is primarily stationed at the high school, the chief said, adding that the district also has members of a security company in place at all of its schools.
