Bullies Shoot 8th Grade Student with BB Gun in Classroom, Victim Says

School police had planned to fill out a crime report to investigate the incident

Los Angeles school district police plan to investigate a shooting incident at a middle school where a BB gun injured a 13-year-old student.

Solomon Harris, an eighth grade student at Curtiss Middle School in Carson, was allegedly shot in the back and face as he sat in class by two classmates who regularly bully him, Harris said.

"They call me gay, talk about my bumps on my nose, and my face and just how I talk," Harris said. "I felt it, and all day going through school, I was like, why me?"

The classmates, a boy and a girl, had showed Harris the gun, which he thought was a toy gun. The teacher had no idea a BB gun was being passed around, nor did she hear the small pellets fired from the air rifle, Harris said.

"How are you going to sit in a classroom and the teacher didn't observe what's going on?" asked Ruth Debro, Harris' mother who is a teacher in the school district.

Debro plans on moving her son to another school for fear that something else might happen.

"I'm not sending him back to Curtiss Middle school to be abused anymore," Debro said. "I would feel guilty if i sent him back and something happened to him and what does that teach him?"

Los Angeles Unified School District and school police were made aware of the shooting, which was reported after school hours. School police had planned to fill out a crime report to investigate the incident Thursday morning.

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