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The father of a teenagerwho ended up in an ICU after being brutally beaten outside a Missouri school last month has now revealed the text message battle which led up to the violent attack.
Kaylee Gain, 16, suffered a skull fracture and bleeding and swelling on the brain after she was attacked near her high school on 8 March.
Now, a month on from the horrific incident, Kaylee’s father has revealed a slew of texts exchanged between his daughter and her alleged attacker in the lead-up to the incident.
Clinton Gain, 41, toldThe New York Post that, following his daughter’s hospitalisation, he and his partner, Kaylee’s stepmother Jamie Gain, checked her cellphone to try to understand what led up to the beating that was ultimately caught on camera and went viral on social media.
Mr Gain revealed that he found messages showing the pair had both to meet up and fight one-on-one.
“They both agreed to the fight, to meet up and settle what was going on,” Mr Gain said.
Ms Gain said that both of the teenagers had made a “terrible decision” to settle their dispute with violence.
But the couple pushed back on any sort of narrative that Kaylee may have been bullying her attacker, saying that the messages exchanged were equally hostile on both sides.
Mr Gain added that it “doesn’t matter who said what to who before it all happened,” because, in the end, it was his daughter who was “nearly killed”.
“We hope the justice system sees that she went way overboard and nearly killed her,” Mr Gain said.
The 8 March fight unfolded at an intersection near Hazelwood East High School, with footage showing Kaylee’s head being slammed into the concrete ground by another teen.
Following the incident, police arrested a 15-year-old girl, who is being held by the St Louis County Family Court on assault charges.
After her arrest, the teen’s aunt sparked outrage for setting up a Change.org petition calling on Chief Juvenile Officer Rick Gaines not to charge her as an adult. In the petition, she claimed that her niece is a multilingual honour roll student who was “defending herself from harassment and bullying”.
The teenager remains in custody and it is currently unclear whether or not she will be charged as an adult.
Kaylee spent weeks in critical condition in hospital before she was finally able to breathe on her own and left the intensive care unit on 22 March.
Kaylee’s father told The New York Post that she is now in speech and movement therapy sessions.
Even though she is now able to speak, he said that she doesn’t always make sense and “sort of talks in a loop”. Kaylee also still needs help to walk.
One saving grace, however, is that Kaylee does greet her dad when he comes to visit, appearing to know it is him, he said. The teenager is still not quite sure how she ended up in the hospital in the first place, he said.
“She’ll ask us why she is there in the hospital,” Mr Gain claimed to the outlet. “She doesn’t remember the fight or a few days before it. We told her what happened, but not too much.”
Before the fight which landed her in hospital, Kaylee had been involved in another fight with a different person the day before, the family’s attorney Bryan Kaemmerer confirmed. Both she and the other student were suspended as a result.
Source: independent.co.uk
