49. That’ll Teach Him A Lesson
My niece is from Bavaria, and I am from Baden-Wurttemberg. Her summer vacation started a whole week earlier than ours, and she came for a visit with my brother and her siblings. It was in the morning and we decided to take the dog for walk and go to the bakery on the other side of the street of a big school complex. I went in, while she stayed outside with dog. When I came out, my blood ran cold.
She was gone. I decided to call her on the cellphone, and she says “Thank god you’re calling.” Some guy in the background is yelling: “How dare you take a phone call while I am talking to you, you are in enough trouble for skipping class.” As I later found out, he ripped the phone out of her hand, and must have hung up.
I realized what must have happened, and went into the school to clear up this misunderstanding. I go right away to the principal’s office hoping my niece would either be there, or soon be brought in by a teacher. Outside, I can already hear him screaming at her. He’s saying: “Stop giving me a fake name and stop lying, you won´t get out of here until I have the truth! I promise you this will be mentioned in your permanent record!”
I did not bother knocking and went right in. He looked at me and yells, “Who are you? How dare you just come in here without knocking!” I say: “I am this girl’s uncle, what do you think you’re doing here? She doesn’t go to your school!” I couldn’t believe his reaction. He says, “Ah, I guess you where the one on the phone. Nice try, but you will not help her trick her way out of this. I will get to the bottom of this, and I will only release her to her parents. Now get out of my office or I will call the authorities and have you detained by the authorities for trespassing in a school!”
I say: “I will stay right here to protect my niece from you. Calling the authorities sounds like a really good idea—after all, you’ve abducted my niece.” So I made the call and told them my niece had been abducted and that a strange man was holding her at the principal’s office of the local school. This idiot still couldn’t wrap his head around the mistake he’d made.
He yells: “Do you really expect me to believe your fake phone call ?” Then he started to shout at my niece again, who at that point was in tears. I told him: “STOP SHOUTING AT MY NIECE, you will not address her till the authorities are here, or I WILL shut you up.” Then he says he’s calling the authorities to have me detained. So he called them, only to find out that my initial call to them was real.
Suddenly, he wasn’t so sure anymore, and you could tell the cogs in his head where finally start to turn. About five minutes later the authorities finally arrived, and they asked us separately. Here is roughly what my niece told them. She was waiting outside the bakery, when this random guy came at her, screaming like a banshee.
He yelled at her that he is really fed up with people skipping school the last week before vacation starts, and will make an example out of her. Before she could get a word in edgewise, he grabbed her by the arm really hard—hard enough she got a bad bruise for over a week—and that is what started to get him into real trouble.
The officers also took her data, and confirmed she is from Bavaria. They then asked us if we wanted to press charges. I just said throw the book at him. The guy heard the authorities sayíng stuff about pressing charges and suddenly realized he was in it real deep, so he came over. He starts going: “Hey, this is just a misunderstanding, you have to understand I have to be strict with people skipping school.”
I say to him, “If by being strict you mean attacking a 12-year-old so badly she has a handprint from you on her arm that will create a huge bruise, abducting her from my care, and wrongfully imprisoning her in your office while screaming at her and scaring the beejezus out of her, then no, I DO NOT HAVE TO UNDERSTAND THAT!”
He’s saying please, it’s blown out of proportion, he could get suspended or lose his job. I wasn’t having it. I said that anybody who treats a scared 12-year-old girl like that should not get to work with kids. In the end, he really did lose his job, and I am very glad he did. During the investigation, it turned out he was a sorry excuse for a teacher who belittled kids, who always took the teacher’s side no matter how wrong they were, and had even slapped kids on several occasions.
He went to court for assault and attempted abduction plus wrongful imprisonment, plus a few more bodily harms against students. He lost his job and pension, got two years on probation and 500 hours community service with the stipulation that it could be nothing that involved kids. He was also forbidden to ever work with kids again.
