Students talk about being pepper sprayed during fight at Lake Worth High School
By Ari Hait
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LAKE WORTH BEACH, Florida (WPBF) — More than 40 students and staff at Lake Worth High School were injured during a fight on campus that led to a school resource officer spraying pepper spray.
Palm Beach County Fire Rescue said 32 of the injured had to be hospitalized.
All of the injuries are considered to be minor.
Video obtained by WPBF 25 News shows two girls fighting in the cafeteria as a large crowd gathers around them, cheering and screaming.
Another video shows the school resource officer stepping in and spraying pepper spray all over the cafeteria to break up the fight.
“It went in my eye, my nose, in my throat,” said Madelin Lopez, a sophomore. “And it kept burning.”
“People were coughing,” said Ashley Lucas, a junior. “They were trying to cover their mouth.”
“People were having asthma attacks and stuff,” said Jazzy Simon, a freshman.
“It was really burning my face,” said Angie Dejuan, a sophomore. “I couldn’t breathe at all.”
Dejuan said she has asthma and was one of the students who had to be hospitalized and given oxygen.
She said she wasn’t sure what was going on until she got hit in the face with the pepper spray.
“I was like nothing is going to happen, so I wiped my eyes off,” she said. “And then I opened my eyes. That’s when I started feeling the burning. I just needed water, something thrown in my face.”
Lopez tells a similar story.
“I couldn’t even see,” she said. “I was coughing a lot.”
Lopez said she saw the officer spraying, but didn’t know what it was until her eyes, nose, and throat started to burn.
She needed someone else to call her mom.
“I had told my friend to call her for me, because I couldn’t speak, because my throat was burning a lot,” she said.
Lopez said there’s no way she’s going back to school Friday.
Dejuan said the same thing.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow, but I’m definitely not going to school tomorrow,” she said.
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