Police report: When youth group counselors get mad

Here's another item from the police reports, passed along by P-I breaking news reporter Casey McNerthney.
When a church youth group counselor tells you to clean up, you'd better really clean up.
The following happened last Wednesday at a church youth group meeting somewhere in the city, according to a general offense report filed with the Seattle Police Department. As the meeting was wrapping up, three boys decided to go outside and hang out, according to what one of the boys later told police. One of their counselors yelled at them to come back inside and clean up.
They did, one of the boys told police. Then they went back outside.
The counselor didn't like that. As one of the boys tells it, the counselor got a "crazed look in his eyes," yelled some profanity, grabbed this boy by the neck and "either punched or slapped him on the left side of the his face." When one of the other boys told him he couldn't do that, the counselor picked him up "by his collar" and said "he could kill him right now."
The first boy still had two scratches on the side of his neck when his mother submitted the report, according to the police officer who filed it on May 6. The mother told police she was under the impression that a church attorney had advised the church to file a report with Child Protection Services, who would then tell police. That never happened, she told police, so she filed her own report.
According to the report, church staff told the boy's mother that the counselor would no longer work with the youth group.
Posted by Monica Guzman Monica Guzmanat May 9, 2008 12:54 p.m.
Category: Crime and courts