Student In Fight Speaks Out
One of the students involved in a fist fight that was caught on tape, speaks out. The brawl happened in the bathroom of the Chattanooga Girls Leadership Academy, in December. On Friday we talked with administrators at CGLA who it was all a planned fight. But Monday, we spoke with one of the ninth graders who was throwing punches, who says there was nothing fake about it.
15 Year old Treasure Strickland was one of the students throwing punches in the fight. "I know I made a bad decision to go in the restroom to fight her, when, I didn't have to do it at school, but I just made the wrong decision."
Treasure admits she shouldn't have gone into the CGLA bathroom that day, when she says another student challenged her to a fight. In the cell phone video, you can see Strickland pushing and punching the other ninth grader.
But Strickland says she didn't know it was being recorded, and would later be posted on youtube. On Friday, school officials told us, it was all staged. Co-Director Julie Davidson said, "We learned that it was a staged event, that the planned it, quite inappropriately, and planned it and post it on youtube."
Treasure says, "They're really just lying saying that I planned it, you can't plan, you can plan a fight but that was not a planned fight."
Strickland's mother says she's not happy about what her daughter did, but also isn't happy about how this was handled. Shonteion Strickland says, "Give comments that were false, lying and making my child seem like she was seeking some attention or staging fights."
We called school officials again Monday to hear their response to the Stricklands, but we never got a phone call back. Shonteion says there's nothing fake about the violence in the video. "It definitely was not fake, there was nothing fake about it."
Strickland says Treasure is a good student who normally doesn't get into trouble, and even showed us an award she won at a ceremony the morning of the fight.
Again, on Friday the co-directors of CGLA told us no one was hurt in the fight, and they had discussions with all the students involved, and some parents.
