Students say assault report is lacking
Duyngoc Truong is a lithe, 16-year-old junior who stands 5-foot-3 and weighs 108 pounds.
At dismissal Dec. 3, she was chased through the streets outside South Philadelphia High School until she ran out of room to run, pinned against a brick wall of the St. Agnes Continuing Care Center by a mob of a hundred, and pummeled about the face and head.
"I thought, 'Oh, my God, maybe I'm going to die,' " she said.
She told her story to an investigator who helped compile the official school-district report on the Dec. 3 violence. But in an interview, Truong disputed how the report describes a key part of the assault.
Interviews with six Asian students and a legal complaint obtained by the newspaper show:
The students say investigators ignored crucial portions of their accounts of the violence.
Youths insist that interviewers cut off their attempts to place the Dec. 3 violence in the context of years of assaults against Asian students.
At least 26 separate assaults against Asian students occurred during the 2008-09 school year alone, the complaint says.
Retired federal judge James Giles, who conducted the inquiry at the request of Superintendent Arlene Ackerman, said his report was objective, balanced, and aimed at discovering the truth.
Neither he nor his staff blocked any student's attempt to describe earlier incidents at the school, he said, and all of the interviewed students were afforded full opportunity to tell all that they knew.
"The first question," Giles said, "was what do you know of your own personal knowledge? What have you heard, if anything, and is there anything that you'd like to say that we haven't asked you about?"
Anyone with additional information should report it to the district, he said. In fact, "if the school district wants me to do a further investigation, I'd be happy to," he said.
Among the incidents recounted in the Feb. 23 Giles report is the horrific dismissal-time attack on 10 Vietnamese students outside the school. The report says the students were assaulted after "something" - unknown and unidentified - caused them to run from their adult escorts and into danger.