Why East Idaho News posted video of a student getting attacked at school
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The video is hard to watch.
A teenage girl is walking down the hall at Rigby High School when another girl comes up behind her, grabs her hair, hits her face and pulls her to the ground. For the next minute, the attacker continues to pummel the girl in the head as the victim struggles on the floor.
I say “video” when I should actually say “videos” because multiple students pull out their phones and record the attack. Some cheer, one says, “Why doesn’t she fight back?” and others laugh.
Those videos were posted on social media – likely within seconds of the assault – and on Friday, EastIdahoNews.com began receiving messages, calls, texts and emails showing the hallway beatdown.
The tips continued through the weekend, and reporter David Pace began investigating. He reached out to the victim’s parents, who were willing to share their story, and contacted the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office, Jefferson County Prosecutor’s Office, and Jefferson School District 251 administrators.
David found videos of other purported fights at Rigby High School online – including the Instagram account “rhsfights2024” – where eight encounters had been uploaded for the world to see. The page has since been taken down.
For four days, David worked on the story, speaking at length with Tyler and Whitney Pincock (the victim’s parents), the sheriff’s office and the prosecutor’s office. Nobody from the school district returned David’s emails, but Superintendent Chad Martin sent a message to parents expressing “deep concern and disgust” over the attacker’s behavior and explaining “there is no place for it in our schools or community.”
Unfortunately, EastIdahoNews.com has covered situations like this in the past. Two years ago, a girl at Thunder Ridge High School in Idaho Falls was leaving a classroom when three girls attacked her. Again, other students filmed with their phones and posted the footage on social media, one with the caption “Thunder Wild.”
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We’ve been sent videos of other school fights, and in a lot of cases, parents don’t want to talk on the record because they’re worried their child could become more of a target.
Students who have witnessed fights at school have told us they’re scared to get involved because they might get in trouble, suspended or criminally charged. Many say they film the encounters for evidence and to assist with investigations.
The Rigby story was posted on EastIdahoNews.com Wednesday at 6 p.m. and had been read over 30,000 times by midnight. As of Thursday morning, over 1,000 comments were on our website and Facebook page – some critical that we shared the video and one person saying we support kids fighting. (Really? That’s ridiculous).
I’ll be honest – we debated for days whether to include the video with the story. We ultimately decided we needed to for a few reasons:
- The video had already been widely circulated on social media.
- Video of the attack shows the seriousness of the situation better than us describing it.
- Other parents and students asked us to share the video to raise awareness of what some kids are facing when they go to school.
- The victim’s parents said they were comfortable with EastIdahoNews.com posting the video.
We used one of the videos sent to us and because children are involved, we added a blur filter, bleeped out names and curse words, and made sure students were not identifiable. To be clear, had the victim and her parents asked us not to include the video in our story, we would not have done so.
EastIdahoNews.com plans to do more reporting about bullying in eastern Idaho schools over the coming months. It’s an important issue that should be discussed and if you have a story to share, please email news@eastidahonews.com.
I don’t have any high schoolers yet, but this morning, as I drove my kids to school, I talked with them about the incident. They did not want to view the video, but we discussed what they should do if they see someone getting bullied or beat up and ways they might be able to help others.
That’s another reason we posted the video. Hopefully, parents can use this very unfortunate situation to talk about bullying and fighting with their own kids. Maybe sharing the video will prevent one other child from getting attacked. We can only hope.