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teacher, who was also the varsity football coach, was terminated for allegedly discouraging alumni from making donations. He sued for $500,000, saying that he was terminated as a result of age discrimination, and that the administration and Board of Trustees slandered him and made comments that he “lost control both on the field and in the classroom.” 2
    A week after the arrest of the Saint John’s math teacher, the school had some drug-abuse professionals come to the school and give a presentation about how to resist drugs. One woman came from an organization called the Albany Diocese Drug Education Ministry, and her job was to lecture at all of the Catholic schools in the Albany diocese and provide drug education. In her closing statement, the woman described how when she would tell people about what she did for a living, she would often be surprised that many individuals thought Catholic school students came from perfect families and had stable home lives. As she was making this statement, the Saint John’s students murmured statements of disgust. In fact, most of the students had anything but normal home lives and weren’t perfect at all. In June 1997, it was rumored a Saint John’s student was expelled from the school after it was discovered that he had written pro–Ku Klux Klan propaganda and made racist drawings in his notebook. One of the smartest students in the class had an incarcerated parent; another student was expelled from his public school because he brought a gun to school one day.
    It was very difficult for me to make friends at Saint John’s. From the beginning, I was an outsider. When we were at plebe training, the student in front of me was marching very slowly in an attempt to make others laugh. This irritated me because I had no room to march and the person behind me was stepping on the heels of my feet. I almost fell a couple of times. Finally, I had enough and tapped the student ahead of me to move up. Little did I know that soon after that, we would turn around and that class clown would now be in back of me. He was getting behind my face, actually talking directly in my ear, even trying to bark—not a good way to make friends on one of the first days of school.
    For the first month or so, I continued to hang out with my same group of friends from public school. Toward the end of September, though, I started to have difficulty with them. As a joke, Evan, who I knew from middle school and who had become a close friend of Eric’s, one day started telling everyone that he was going to fight me. When he told Eric that it was a joke, Eric said he thought it would actually be a good idea for Evan to fight me.
    I had never been in a fistfight. Eric was a friend of mine, but he liked to see me get upset. He never fully understood the ramifications of his actions on others. He would always call our friend Dan fat. Dan let him and still wanted to be friends with him.
    Eric was very good at upsetting me. He would tell Evan personal information about me, specifically about my father. Evan would yell in the hallways, “Get a dad,” and he called my mother a whore—after which I punched him in his face. Evan and Eric would make fun of the way my mother looked, how I walked, that I tried to make friends at Saint John’s and went to a dance there, and that I got good grades.
    Finally, after about six weeks of being picked on by people who I once considered very good friends, I decided that I would fight Evan and put an end to this. We actually walked to the woods behind the middle school that we had all attended, and I began the fight by punching Evan in his neck from behind. Then Evan knocked me to the ground and started to slap me before I begged him to stop—which he did. The people I once considered my closest friends, (Dan and Eric), just sat there and acted entertained. I ended up walking home by myself with my ripped jeans and later found out that they went to the mall to celebrate.
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