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5 Year Handcuffed by
School
BY CARRIE MELAGO
New York
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Friday, January 25th 2008, 4:00 AM
Kindergartner Dennis Rivera, 5,
tells how he was handcuffed to chair at Queens school last week as
mom, Jasmina Vasquez, listens.
A 5-year-old boy was handcuffed and
hauled off to a psych ward for misbehaving in kindergarten - but the
tot's parents say NYPD school safety agents are the ones who need
their heads examined.
"He's 5 years old. He was scared to
death," Dennis Rivera's mother, Jasmina Vasquez, told the Daily
News. "You cannot imagine what it's done to him."
Dennis - who suffers from speech
problems, asthma and attention deficit disorder - never went back to
class at Public School 81 in Queens after the traumatic incident.
His mom and a school source said
Dennis threw a tantrum inside the Ridgewood school at 11 a.m. on
Jan. 17.
Dennis was taken to the principal's
office, where he apparently knocked items off a desk.
Rather than calling the boy's
parents, a school safety agent cuffed the boy's small hands behind
his back using metal restraints, the school source said.
The agent and school officials then
called an ambulance to take the tot to Elmhurst Hospital Center for
a mental evaluation.
Vasquez was stunned when a guidance
counselor called her at work to say her son was being taken to the
psych ward.
Vasquez rushed to the school from
her job as a patient representative at Bellevue Hospital in
Manhattan. On the way, she called Dennis' baby-sitter, who was
closer to PS 81, and asked her to hurry over to the school.
When baby-sitter Sandy Ortiz
arrived, Dennis was still handcuffed, she said. School safety agents
also were holding his elbows even though the boy was calm, Ortiz
said. Dennis is about 4-feet-3 and weighs 68 pounds.
"I hugged him. I said, 'OK, release
the cuffs, I'm taking him,'" she recalled. "They told me, 'No, Miss.
You're not taking him anywhere.'"
Ortiz routinely picks up Dennis
from class. She said she's never seen him behave in a way that would
require him to be restrained.
"I was so upset. There's no reason
to handcuff a baby of 5 years old, traumatize him that way," she
said.
The handcuffs were removed before
Dennis was walked out of the school and driven by ambulance to
Elmhurst Hospital Center. He was evaluated at the hospital and
released about four hours later, his mom said.
School sources said Dennis had
punched an assistant principal the day before he acted out in class.
The sources also said he broke glass in an office door a week
earlier.
A spokeswoman for the city
Education Department declined to comment on why school safety agents
needed to handcuff Dennis, saying the incident was under
investigation.
The NYPD, which oversees school
safety agents, also declined to discuss specifics. Deputy Police
Commissioner Paul Browne said, "We hope common sense would prevail
and we are looking at what happened."
Vasquez immediately withdrew Dennis
from PS 81 and enrolled him in a private school, Grand Street
Settlement.
"I asked him, 'Do you want to go
back to that school?' He broke down in tears," Vasquez said. "He
said, 'I don't want to go! I don't want to go!'"
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