Attorney Eric Hageman appeared on Fox 9 News last night to discuss new findings in the drowning death of Abdullahi Charif, a seventh-grade student who drown during gym class. Eric and Fred Pritzker are representing Abdullahi’s family. Hageman cited a report issued yesterday that said Abdullahi, who could not swim well, was playing King of the Hill on a raft with his classmates when he was pushed into the deep end. At some point, he was pushed off the raft in the deep end. According to the report, that was the last time he was seen before his body was discovered at the bottom of the pool. Hageman again points to inadequate supervision as a cause of the drowning. One teacher was the only adult supervising 28 children, some who could not swim well. At the end of the gym time, the teacher grabbed a pair of shoes from the pool and took them into the locker room to ask who they belonged to. He then went back to the pool and found Abdullahi at the bottom of the pool in 9 and a half feet of water.
“He should have been seen much earlier than he was. There’s simply no excuse,” Eric told Fox News 9. “When we send our kids off to school, we expect they are going to be watched over; we expect they are going to be protected. Here, that didn’t happen, and the family needs to know why.”
Eric provided the quote below for this article:
There is simply no circumstance in which it would be acceptable for a teacher “supervising” a swim class – but which even the teacher acknowledges was just “free play” – to allow children who were non-swimmers to play “king of the hill” on a large raft in the deep end of the pool. Yet that’s what happened here, with the ensuing tragedy a predictable result of that lack of supervision. The bottom line is that Abduallahi drowned because his teacher simply wasn’t paying enough attention.
