California Mom Framed by Daughter’s Bully, Lawyers Claim

A 30-year-old mom from Santa Rosa, CA is being framed, according to her attorneys. Delia Garcia-Bratcher was accused of choking an 11-year-old boy at Olivet Charter Elementary School on Friday, May 17th. She was at the school at lunchtime and asked her son, also a student, to point out the student who was bullying her daughter, according to prior reports. The mother confronted the boy, who later told school officials that she grabbed him by the throat “in front of a number of children,” a statement from the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office said.

The boy complained of being choked and school staff photographed him with red marks around his neck. No adult saw the incident but young witnesses later told a deputy that the mother threatened the boy. Garcia-Bratcher was arrested on a charge of felony child abuse and was later released on $30,000 bail.

Her attorneys have now filed a report where a 10-year-old witness stated the alleged victim choked himself. The Santa Rosa Press Democrat reports that a defense investigator spoke to the youngster who said he told the principal and a sheriff’s deputy that he saw the complainant put both his hands around his neck, leaving red marks. The young witness says that the police did not believe him.

Garcia-Bratcher’s attorney, Ben Adams, said he passed along the report to Sonoma County prosecutors. and hopes charges will be dropped against his client on the next court date. A spokeswoman for Sonoma County District Attorney confirmed receipt of the report but declined to comment on the case, noting that the investigation was ongoing.

In the meantime, there is a lot of debate going on as to whether the boy who claimed to be choked could make up such a thing. Just the other day, Care2Causes sent us an email to read an article by Ximena Ramirez on 5 Examples of How You Shouldn’t Deal with Bullying. In the article was this video. “Showing any young person in your life this video is absolutely a step in the right direction for humanizing the problem of bullying and dealing with it the right way,” Ximena wrote. Well, we watched it, but didn’t quite get the same thing out of it as Ximena did. It should be shown to teachers and parents, more than kids.

In it author Ernesto Quinones relates a tale of 7th grade bullying. A big Italian-American kid named Mario used to terrorize him and other Hispanic kids in the cafeteria, pouring milk down their backs and calling them wetbacks. Nobody did anything about it and eventually Mario got around to Ernesto. When Ernesto had enough, he stood up to Mario and punched him. Well, “growing a set” didn’t quite work out the way Ernesto had been told it would. The bigger and stronger Mario beat the stuffing out of him. So Ernesto devised another way to get even with Mario and it was quite unusual. And it resulted in a far more traumatic and horrendous punishment for Mario than he deserved. At the end of the video, Ernesto says he’s sorry to Mario. If any conclusions were drawn from the story, they are not in the video, but one conclusion you can easily reach is that kids are certainly capable of thinking up convoluted plans of revenge.