A 13-year-old Pennsylvania girl was arrested after allegedly stabbing another student at a school, police officers said.
The stabbing on Friday, Sept. 21 happened around 10:50 a.m. after the girl got into a fight with another 13-year-old boy, an eighth-grader, at William Dick School on West Diamond Street, in the neighborhood of Strawberry Mansion.
The girl wielded a pair of “adult-sized scissors and stabbed the boy in the upper torso,” CBS reported.
Lee Whack, a spokesman for the School District of Philadelphia, told the Philadelphia Inquirer that the stabbing happened as students were transitioning from one class to another.
The altercation started during a science class and the teacher de-escalated it and thought it was resolved, he added.
“The teacher was working to deescalate the argument, but a female student produced a pair of scissors and did stab the male student,” Whack said.
Whack said the scissors were not the duller ones used by younger children, but were more pointed.
Philadelphia police were called around 11 a.m. Friday to the William Dick Public School on the 2400 block of North 24th Street for the report of a stabbing https://t.co/qmcz3d1g7J pic.twitter.com/LMxpkDgUsq
— Action News on 6abc (@6abc) September 21, 2018
Heavy police presence at William Dick School at 24th and Diamond. Woman just ran into and then out of school and told me her son was just stabbed. She sped off to the hospital. @6abc pic.twitter.com/QtK6aRCfd7
— Bob Brooks (@BobBrooks6abc) September 21, 2018
#BREAKING: Skyfox over school stabbing at William Dick School 24th & Diamond #NorthPhilly
13 yr old stabbed in abdomen by fellow student pic.twitter.com/OdUXWwximT— FOX 29 (@FOX29philly) September 21, 2018
A teen girl stabbed a 13-year-old boy with scissors at a North #Philadelphia school, #police say https://t.co/kov34Ri2jC
— CBS Philly (@CBSPhilly) September 21, 2018
“Violence like this is unacceptable,” Whack said. “Our hearts and thoughts are with the student who was injured, for his speedy recovery.”
The boy was rushed to Hahnemann Hospital and is in stable condition and the girl was arrested.
A student who witnessed the stabbing told ABC 6 that the boy was bleeding and taken to the nurse’s office before being rushed to the hospital. The witnesses’ mother said the victim was placed in a wheelchair in the nurse’s office before being carried onto a stretcher into an ambulance.
She said the boy looked alert when she saw him.
Parents told the Inquirer that they were upset with the stabbing; one said she was moving away next year while another considered putting her son in a different school.
According to the school’s website, William Dick has students from kindergarten to 8th grade.