Fourteen-year-old Bridgette Chocoteco said something after being badly burned at Bakersfield High School that every adult who cares for children ought
Fourteen-year-old Bridgette Chocoteco said something after being badly burned at Bakersfield High School that every adult who cares for children ought to hear.
“I know my actions weren’t right. But that doesn’t excuse theirs.”
There it is.
A child standing inside a painful story and refusing to leave out the part that belongs to her.
According to Bridgette’s account, the August 25 incident began after she had been in a fight with a male student. A teacher later grabbed her arm. Bridgette pulled away, and when the teacher continued holding her, Bridgette says she hit her. School security became involved.
Bridgette does not tell this story as though she did everything right.
That is precisely why adults should listen carefully to what she says next.
Bridgette says security personnel took her down onto a black metal utility plate that had been sitting beneath the Bakersfield sun. Photographs and local reporting document serious burns following the encounter. Bridgette says that while adults restrained her against the metal, she screamed, “I’m burning! I’m burning!”
She says she was not immediately released.
According to Bridgette, someone responded with words to the effect of “That’s what you get.”
Her family says she was held there for roughly two minutes. Bridgette suffered second- and third-degree burns severe enough to require specialized treatment at a burn center in Fresno. Students at Bakersfield High later walked out of class, demanding answers. The Kern High School District has said the incident is under investigation.
There are facts investigators still need to establish, including the exact sequence of the restraint and what individual staff members said and did. There is already something this fourteen-year-old girl has made beautifully clear.
She can tell the truth about herself and still ask adults to tell the truth about themselves.
That is a lesson children need long before the day they need to use it.
Because children make mistakes.
They fight. They break rules. They lie about where they have been. They sneak out. They follow friends into foolish situations. They lose their tempers. Teenagers sometimes make choices that leave their parents staring at the ceiling at two in the morning wondering what in the world has gotten into this child they love. They are children. We love them through.
Some mistakes require serious consequences.
And through all of it, the child remains a child.
She still has a body capable of being injured. She still has a voice worth hearing. She still deserves medical attention when she is hurt. Adults still have boundaries around what they may do to her.
Children need to know this because shame can make a child hide the most important part of a story.
A girl who went somewhere she was forbidden to go may decide she cannot tell anyone she was assaulted there. A boy who started a fight may believe he has no right to tell his mother that an adult hurt him afterward. A child who lied about being at a friend’s house may keep a frightening secret because telling what happened would require admitting the lie first.
That little calculation can become a locked door.
I was wrong, so maybe I deserved what happened next.
Bridgette’s words give children a key.
“I know my actions weren’t right. But that doesn’t excuse theirs.”
Imagine how much safer children could be if they learned early that they are allowed to tell the whole story.
Not the cleaned-up story.
Not the story that makes them look innocent.
The whole story.
I went somewhere I wasn’t supposed to go, and something happened.
I lied to you, and I need your help.
I hit somebody first, and then an adult hurt me.
I broke the rule, and I am scared to tell you what happened afterward.
A trustworthy adult should be able to hold all of that without forcing a frightened child to audition for compassion.
We can address what a child did while investigating what was done to her. We can impose appropriate consequences while tending to an injury. We can teach responsibility while making absolutely certain that a child understands she can always come home and tell us when somebody has harmed her.
This is especially important for children living with abuse.
People who harm children can make powerful use of a child’s mistakes. They may remind her that she broke a rule, accepted the ride, went into the room, took something she wasn’t supposed to take, lied to her mother, talked back, started the argument or agreed to keep an earlier secret.
Then comes the trap: nobody will believe you because you were doing something wrong too.
Children need language strong enough to survive that trap.
Parents, teachers, counselors, relatives and every other safe adult can help give it to them.
There is another lesson in Bridgette’s story for the grown folks.
When a child in our physical control says, “I’m burning,” those words require our attention.
The same is true when a child says she cannot breathe, cannot feel her hand, feels dizzy, is going to be sick or is in serious pain. Conflict does not make a child’s nervous system disappear. Anger does not make her skin stop burning. Discipline does not make an injury less real.
Sometimes a child crying out is giving us information we urgently need.
Bridgette Chocoteco is fourteen years old. She should be healing, going to school, figuring out friendships, discovering what she loves, getting irritated with homework and growing into herself. Instead, she has been receiving treatment for serious burns while adults investigate how she came to suffer them at school.
And somehow, from inside all of that, the child gave us one of the clearest sentences in the entire story.
“I know my actions weren’t right. But that doesn’t excuse theirs.”
Listen to her.
Teach your children what she has already learned.
Tell them they never have to manufacture innocence before coming to you for help. Tell them you want the part where they messed up too. Tell them the truth will not frighten you away from protecting them. Let them know that consequences and care can sit at the same kitchen table.
And when your child finally comes through that door carrying a story she is terrified to tell, give her somewhere safe to put the whole thing.
We will deal with what you did.
And we will deal with what was done to you.
You are still our child.
You are still worthy of protection.
You can always come home and tell us the truth.