The parents of an 11-year-old California girl are outraged after a school employee allegedly punished the middle school student by forcing her to duct tape her mouth shut.
Noemi Hurtado, 11, was eating lunch at Blair Middle School in Pasadena in the company of her friends when a female security guard allegedly punished the pre-teen for ‘being too loud,’ forcing her to put duct tape over her mouth.
‘I got a phone call that no parent wants to receive,’ Ricardo Hurtado, Noemi’s father, told KTLA5.
‘She was playing with her friends and being a little too loud. She was asked to stop once and she didn’t, I guess, and continued to play.’
Ricardo said once Noemi was duct taped, the security guard reportedly walked her through the campus and even to a nearby high school just to ‘humiliate’ her.
The school employee then reportedly escorted the young girl to her next class where her father claims she ‘had the nerve to state that to the teacher that she shouldn’t take off the tape because Noemi has a hard time being quiet.’
The infuriated father added that the school’s head of security witnessed the entire ordeal and eventually intervened, removing Noemi from class.
While escorting her back to the principal’s office, the top-ranking security professional allegedly told the girl she wasn’t in any trouble, Ricardo said.
‘I was in shock,’ Ricardo said. ‘I was just trying to make sure that [my daughter] was okay and wasn’t fully damaged herself. An 11-year-old girl shouldn’t be going through this.’
The Pasadena Unified School District has since released a statement on the incident, claiming the school employee involved had been fired.
‘The safety and well-being of our students are our top priority. We are aware of allegations involving a former substitute security officer,’ the district statement reads.
‘As a result, this individual is no longer employed by the district. We take concerns like this very seriously and are cooperating fully with the Pasadena Police Department. We are committed to maintaining a safe and supportive environment for our students.’
Noemi’s family claims they have filed a police report and that they want the security guard to face legal consequences.
The school scandal comes just weeks after a chaotic scene unfolded at a Milwaukee high school as furious parents confronted officials over a security guard accused of filming girls in the locker room.
The security guard, a former police officer named Fernando Bustos, was allegedly caught with roughly 400 videos of girls changing clothes at Cristo Rey Jesuit High School.
Furthermore, the camera’s memory card allegedly has footage of Bustos installing the device inside a locker and then closing the door, according to investigators.
A few weeks earlier, the scorned security guard was fired for what the school described as ‘performance reasons’ in early February.
It was after, when the school was cataloguing items he left behind, that they found his secret camera containing the videos, according to the criminal complaint obtained by DailyMail.com.
On February 19, Milwaukee police were dispatched to the high school over an invasion of privacy complaint, however, it wasn’t until early March, after charges were filed, that parents were informed about the issue by Cristo Rey Jesuit officials.
Hectic footage from school meeting has since emerged, showing desperate parents hollering for answers.
In one portion of the viral video, someone in the crowd can be seen preventing others from leaving the gymnasium.
‘I felt hurt,’ one parent, Brandon Hobbs, told WISN.com. ‘I felt violated. My daughter felt hurt. She felt violated.
‘As a father, that hurt me. Knowing that my daughter could possibly be on one of those tapes,’ Hobbs said.
‘I’m extremely mad,’ he continued. ‘You send your kids to school thinking that they’re going to be looked after. You know what I’m saying? Taken care of.’
Bustos pleaded guilty to one felony count of invasion of privacy in a Wisconsin court on March 13.