Family says New Brunswick student’s assault was hate-based as police arrest 16-year-old

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Premier Blaine Higgs has met with the Israeli parents of a Fredericton high school student, whose story of an alleged hate-related attack has circulated around the world.

Student Shaked Tsurkan was beaten by a fellow Leo Hayes High School student April 30 because she is Jewish, according to her father Eli Tsurkan. A short video of the attack went viral online this week, with the Fredericton police announcing late Friday it had arrested a 16-year-old woman in connection to the incident.

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“As per the Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA), the individual has since been released on conditions, and charges are currently pending,” the police said in a press release. “The investigation into this matter is ongoing.”

News of the arrest came just two days after Fredericton police announced, after the story became public, that its major crime unit was investigating the “physical altercation” between the two teens.

“We came to Canada for a better life, for a safe environment for our daughter because we know that Canada is a country that accepts people for who they are and it’s safe,” Tsurkan told reporters at the New Brunswick legislature Friday.

“People are nice here, so (the beating) was a big shock for us, for Shaked.”

In the leadup to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, Tsurkan said his daughter Shaked was friendly with the female student who would later beat her up. But once the Israel-Gaza conflict started, the other student, who is in Grade 10, started giving “strange looks” to his daughter.

Neither Tsurkan nor the Anglophone School District West have disclosed the name or any other information concerning the identity of the other student involved to be able to get her version of events.

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According to Tsurkan, his daughter was the victim of several incidents over several months before the attack. He said an Israeli flag Shaked had made for a class assignment was ruined several times while other classmates’ flags weren’t touched.

“I said this is something very wrong,” he recalled, adding he visited the school to warn about potential student violence as a result of the Israel-Gaza conflict.

That warning fell on deaf ears, Tsurkan said. Next, his daughter Shaked was accused by the student, who later beat her up, of saying she was “happy with what’s going on in Gaza, like Israel is killing Palestinian children in Gaza and my daughter was happy with that, which is absolutely untrue.”

“My daughter has never said anything like that,” he said. “It’s not our values.”

After his daughter was beaten during lunch hour while off of school property on April 30, Tsurkan said the other student was suspended for five days, while his daughter was advised not to go outside alone, to stay in areas of the school covered by cameras and not to use the school’s public restrooms.

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Shaked’s family decided to speak out about the attack this week after growing frustrated by the response from the Anglophone School District West.

“I call for everybody to do everything they can to stop (these type of incidents),” Tsurkan said. “It’s unacceptable, it’s not civil.”

School, district receive messages with ‘harsh language’

Despite the widespread media attention, the Anglophone School District West (ASDW) isn’t answering questions about the Tsurkan family’s allegations, citing privacy legislation in place to protect students and ongoing police investigations.

“We cannot share the specifics of the incident that occurred, including the precursors to the event and the subsequent conversations with students, parents and others who have responded,” ASDW said in a press release Thursday.

But the district cautioned there are “a number of inaccuracies, assumptions and misguided statements” about the assault being spread on social media. Among those false claims, the district said, were that adults who were shown in the video watching the beating were school staff members.

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“If you were to pour through the online conversations, you’d see how that inaccuracy alone fuelled a lot of anger, concern, and sometimes hatred to be directed at school administrators, staff, students, and elsewhere,” ASDW spokesperson Paul MacIntosh said in an email Friday.

“Similar misinformation was conveyed in countless direct messages received at the school and district level, often with harsh language and criticism with no factual bearing.”

School administration “promptly addressed the incident with the utmost seriousness after a citizen reported the physical assault to police, and police in turn notified the school,” ASDW said in its Thursday press release. “Actions taken at the school level included gathering information from students and assessing safety requirements and the wellbeing of all students involved.”

A later review by the ASDW superintendent and director concluded that school administration had taken the “appropriate action.”

On Thursday, Fredericton West-Hanwell independent MLA Dominic Cardy blasted both the city police for not labelling the attack as antisemitism and the school district for requiring a victim to take measures to protect herself against the alleged attacker.

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Cardy said he had been aware of the attack for two weeks and had told several cabinet ministers before the story was shared publicly and the police issued its first statement Wednesday.

“We need to start standing up for people in this country whether it’s against Christian extremists, Muslim extremists, whether it’s against lunatics on the left and the right, and we need to start saying this is not what our country is about and push back,” said Cardy, a former education minister.

In his email Friday, MacIntosh noted that while a “great deal has been said about the response to the incident,” that there’s been “an absence of all perspectives, as there should be in situations involving students. Their privacy is protected by legislation.”

In April, Fredericton police reported that its investigation into vandalism at Sgoolai Israel Synagogue was now a cold case and that the vandalism wouldn’t be labelled a hate crime because the police had run out of leads and didn’t know the motivation behind the incident. Several windows had been smashed at the Fredericton synagogue on International Holocaust Memorial Day in January.

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On Thursday, Fredericton police issued another press release to provide more details about the sequence of events surrounding the physical altercation between the two teens. Police say officers launched the investigation after they responded to an April 30 call of a fight between two young women on Cliffe Street.

“Over the course of the following week, the investigating officers collected evidence from those involved, witnesses and other parties of interest, then the file was assigned to the force’s major crime unit, where the active investigation currently resides,” the release states.

“Investigations of this nature can be complex and take time.”

‘Not the same child as she was’: father

Education Minister Bill Hogan told reporters Friday it’s up to the school to help Shaked feel safe again. The minister, who devoted his member’s statement Friday to the issue of antisemitism, had spoken with her father a few days ago to see how she was doing.

“It’s a horrible experience and it’s a horrible thing that happened – the fact that there were children videotaping, that there were adults watching that did nothing. It was shameful,” said Hogan, a former Woodstock High School principal.

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However, Hogan said both students need to be able to learn in the same school, “so that’s where the work needs to happen and that’s where it’s one step at a time, it’s one day at a time.”

The minister declined to answer Friday whether it would be appropriate for the alleged perpetrator to remain at that school if charges are laid following the police investigation.

Tsurkan and his wife Michal met with the premier for a closed-door meeting Friday after they were invited to the legislature by Cardy to hear his own member’s statement on the issue of antisemitism.

Tsurkan said he doesn’t believe the other student should be removed from school because she’s also a child, but she needs to be held responsible for her actions and the school needs to take swift action to ensure another incident like this doesn’t occur on its watch.

Shaked is “not the same child as she was” before the attack, missing several days of school because she felt unsafe following the beating, her father said.

“In this case, I believe (the attack) was a hate crime,” he said. “I think these authorities must come with a message, ‘No more.’”

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