Wow, I know this should be in the News thread, but this really pissed me off.
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Newburgh – An enraged mother with a violent past and her two sons broke into a church on South Street Tuesday and beat an elementary school teacher unconscious, city police said yesterday.
Ertha Augustin was pummeled with a desk, telephone receiver, fists and feet by Jamie Lynn Mereness and her sons, police said. The trio unleashed their beating inside a basement classroom at Calvary Presbyterian Church, said Newburgh Detective Lt. Santo Centamore.
Augustin teaches at-risk kids who aren't thriving in a normal classroom setting in the Newburgh School District because of violent tendencies or aggressive behavior, school officials said.
Mereness' 12-year-old son was one of her students, police said, and an altercation with the boy earlier in the day led to the late-afternoon beating.
According to Centamore, the attack unfolded this way:
Earlier in the day Tuesday, Augustin and Mereness' 12-year-old boy got into a confrontation. Augustin called Mereness to discuss the problems. During that telephone conversation, the boy spit in Augustin's face.
Then the boy pushed the teacher. Augustin told Mereness she intended to suspend the boy and send him home. Mereness threatened the teacher, who handed the phone to a security guard, police said. In that same phone call, police said, she told the guard that she intended to "come down and punch the teacher in the face."
The boy left the church to walk to his family's Johnston Street home. After class let out and the security guard left on a school bus at 3:30 p.m., Augustin and her 10-year-old son sat inside what they assumed was a locked building.
That's when Mereness, her 17-year-old son, William Ramos, and her 12-year-old son broke into the basement classroom and attacked Augustin, Centamore said.
"All three punched her, choked her. ... The 12-year-old hit her with a desk, and she lost consciousness," Centamore said. "Before she lost consciousness, she said she saw one of them with a chair in their hands."
When Augustin's son tried to call 911, Centamore said, Ramos punched the boy and yanked the phone cord from the wall. The boy managed to escape and get to a pay phone outside and call for help.
The trio fled and Augustin regained consciousness. She crawled to the security guard's desk and dialed 911.
A warning
Mereness called the school district's Grand Street administration offices before the attack to say she was upset and intended to hurt Augustin, police said yesterday.
District Superintendent R. Nick Johns said he was in a staff meeting when he got a note containing Mereness' name and a general statement saying she was angry and there had been a verbal confrontation.
Johns said as he left the meeting, he passed the note to Dr. Kate Farrell, assistant superintendent of school operations and the administrator responsible for the program.
Farrell said she viewed the note and immediately called a coordinator in charge of the campus "to find out what the situation was." She said the coordinator told her that a meeting was being scheduled with Mereness. The coordinator also told Farrell he was going to Calvary to check on the situation.
Based on the note and her conversation with the coordinator, Farrell said there was no reason to expect the teacher was in danger.
"Protection of our students and staff is our highest priority," she said.
According to Farrell, minutes after her phone call, she got a call from the coordinator saying the teacher had been beaten.
She immediately went to the school.
Yesterday, Johns tried to reconstruct the timeline of events and said the district "did respond within minutes.
"Unfortunately," he said, "this is not the first parent that's made a threat like this. We take every one of them very seriously."
A troubled past
Mereness, 34, appears to have a history of trouble with the law.
In 1992, she was arrested and charged with felony first-degree assault for stabbing her boyfriend. A year earlier, she was arrested and charged with misdemeanor second-degree aggravated harassment. And in 1996, Mereness was arrested and charged with third-degree assault, also a misdemeanor. Dispositions of those cases could not be learned late yesterday.
Around 11 p.m. Wednesday, Mereness and her sons were arrested and charged with second-degree burglary, second-degree assault and second-degree gang assault, all felonies. Ramos was also charged with endangering the welfare of a child and third-degree assault, both misdemeanors, for hitting Augustin's son, police said.
The 12-year-old was released into the custody of a neighbor Tuesday night. Yesterday, the boy was taken into Department of Social Services custody, along with Mereness' three other children, sources said. Mereness and Ramos were sent to Orange County Jail in Goshen in lieu of $25,000 bail each.
Following the attack, Augustin was treated at the Newburgh campus of St. Luke's Cornwall Hospital. She had bumps on her head, a swollen face, contusions, neck and back pain and bruises all over her body.
She was home recovering last night.
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this really made me mad
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