Saturday, August 31, 2024 - A 14-year-old high school student's football dreams came to an end when his coach smashed his head into a wall, his anguished mom claims in new court documents.
Shayson Willock from Brooklyn, New York, was
allegedly beaten so badly by coach Nicholas Nugent in a James Madison High
School stairwell last September that he lost consciousness and needed six
staples in his skull, according to a criminal complaint and civil lawsuit.
“I don’t know who to trust,” his
mother Deslyn Willock said, questioning school administrators who she felt
swept the incident under the rug and left it up to her to report the
attack to the NYPD.
“I don’t know if I can trust the
teachers,” said Willock, who filed a $2.5 million lawsuit Monday against
Nugent, the city and the Department of Education.
“I don’t know if I can trust the coaches. I
don’t even know if I can trust the justice system. I don’t know who to trust at
this point, because I felt like everyone failed me. Everyone failed my son.”
Nugent was arrested days after the Sept. 18,
2023, incident when he allegedly flew into a rage after the child slept off
during a team video review. The coach was charged with multiple counts of
felony assault, endangering the welfare of a child, harassment and menacing,
according to the criminal complaint against him.
He has been released on supervised release although the Department of Education
wouldn’t say if he was still employed by the school district.
Contacted by phone this week by the NY
times, the coach (pictured below) said he couldn’t speak about the case.
“I’m shocked by the phone call to find out
it’s a news thing, but hey, it is what it is. It’s all good,” Nugent said.
“That’s why we’re going to trial, because I’m all about defending my freedom.
I’m all about defending my rights.”
“The
safety of our students is our number one priority,” DOE spokesperson Jenna Lyle
said. “We will review the lawsuit.”
The lawsuit claims that Shayson was getting
over a rough bout of COVID and was having trouble staying awake during the
after-school video review in a classroom when Nugent kicked the kid out and
followed him into the hallway.
Nugent then
allegedly slammed Shayson into the wall multiple times and pushed him into a
metal pole before the teenager ran back into the classroom with blood gushing
from his head and Nugent in pursuit.
The high schooler said that’s when he passed out
.
“He was
trying to tell them that he needed to go to the bathroom so I could wipe off
the blood,” Shayson said.
When
Shayson’s mom got the call that her son was bleeding from his head, she said,
administrators told her that her son fell back during the argument even as she
could hear her son screaming, “He hurt me, he hurt me.”
Willock claims she arrived before any
ambulance did, despite coming from Queens and with an emergency room less than
500 feet away.
“I saw my
son just lying there, bleeding from his head,” she said.
Shayson got
six staples on his head, was concussed and hasn’t played football since, he and
his mother said.
Later
MRIs suggest there could be a brain contusion and damage to his spine, said
Willock’s lawyer, Richard Kenny.
“He has a compromised cervical region with
multiple herniations,” Kenny said, “which is wholly abnormal for anyone
remotely close to his young age.”
Willock
said she had to take leave from work to care for Shayson, who was out of school
for a month and spent nights writhing in pain.
Shayson has switched school, but he
said he can’t imagine playing sports again even if his doctor were to give him
the green light.
“I just didn’t like football anymore,”
Shayson said, adding he stopped playing because “I didn’t know if it was gonna
happen again.”
“When the
situation had just happened, he would tell me that he felt like he doesn’t have
a life anymore,” Willock said. “He feels like everything was taken away from
him.
“As a
mother,” she said, “I would love for him to play football one day again.”
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