Mount Pearl parents left fuming at school board after alleged assault on teenage son

The parents of a Mount Pearl teenager are wondering where to turn, after an alleged violent assault on their son by his high school classmates left him feeling unsafe and unprotected on school grounds.

The former O'Donel High student says he was brutally attacked by six boys during a New Year's Eve party last year, assaulted so severely that police later said it endangered his life, according to his parents.

Those six boys followed him to an empty parking lot, surrounded him and beat him until he was unrecognizable, said Glenn Sullivan, the boy's father, speaking to CBC News from the driveway of his Mount Pearl home.

After the alleged attack, "he didn't come out of his room for about three weeks," Sullivan said, describing how multiple kicks to the head left his son with a severe concussion and bloodied eye.

"His face was all misshapen, and he couldn't hear out of his ear for about a month," Sullivan said.

The boy's mother, Jana Sullivan, picked her son up that night, telling CBC News he was "covered head to toe" in blood, with cauliflowered ears, a swollen nose and two black eyes. Her son says the boys beat him unconscious and threw his phone into a nearby stand of trees. He woke up to the sound of his phone ringing, she said.

The school's principal at first reassured the Sullivans their son would return safely to class after he recovered. But as the months wore on, the family says, administration did little to ensure their child could spend his days at school without encountering his alleged attackers.

That, too, affected their son, whose first name CBC News has agreed to withhold for his mental well-being.

The six boys have been charged as minors with aggravated assault, and can't legally be identified. The allegations against them have not been proven in court.

The alleged attack also didn't happen during school hours, prompting the school to tell the Sullivans their hands were tied in terms of providing discipline or remediation, the family said.

The accused boys continued to harass and antagonize the Sullivans' son, according to his mother, until five of them graduated in June.

One of the accused is still a student at the school, they add. He's accompanied to and from classes, but on his lunch break, he's free to roam — leaving the Sullivans' daughter, a Grade 10 student at O'Donel, vulnerable to what the family is calling intimidation and harassment.

The family asked for that student to be relocated, but say the school declined their request. So their son, 17 and now in Grade 12, moved briefly to Nova Scotia earlier this year to complete his education — the result of what Glenn describes as lip service from the school administration.

"They're just like, 'we're sorry, we understand your frustration.' And that's all you get. Other than that, there's nothing else," he said. "It's just a joke."