Peers: Stabbing suspect was picked on, different from others

NEW YORK (AP) — The student accused of stabbing a classmate to death and seriously injuring another during history class was different from other guys and had been picked on since the school year started, fellow students and police said.

But the boys 18-year-old Abel Cedeno is accused of attacking at the Urban Assembly School for Wildlife hadn’t bothered him before, not until Wednesday morning’s third-period history class, when they started tossing broken bits of pencils and paper at his head, authorities said.

Cedeno snapped, they said. He excused himself to go to the bathroom, and when he came back, he pulled out a switchblade and started fighting and slashing at them, police said. Fifteen-year-old Mathew McCree was killed and a 16-year-old was seriously wounded.

“Everybody just stood back. A few of them were holding Matthew. A few of them were holding towels on the wound,” witness Jomarlyn Colon, 16, told the Daily News. “All the kids were crying and screaming.”

While school safety agents raced to the room and the teachers and students tried to stop the bleeding, a counselor confronted Cedeno in the hallway and he handed over the blade, police said.

Cedeno was charged Thursday with murder and weapon possession. His lawyer didn’t immediately comment.

He told police that he bought the switchblade online for protection and had been harassed at least since the school year began. But he didn’t specify why, Chief of Detectives Robert Boyce said Thursday.

Yanique Heatley, 18, a student at the school, told reporters that Cedeno was “different from the other guys.”

“He likes Nicki Minaj, stuff from H&M. He likes Kylie Jenner,” she said.

“He usually gets bullied a lot,” said Asia Jones, 18. She said fellow students bothered Cedeno in the hall and “talk crap to him.”

“He’s nice,” she said. “He’s sensitive. He has a good heart.”

On his Instagram page, Cedeno posted pictures and videos of himself vamping with flowers in his hair, strutting down a street and singing along with female rappers.

“I thought I was cute,” he posted in the caption of one video.

Police said Cedeno had not gone to school officials before with any complaints of harassment. The teen’s mother was stuck in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria, and it wasn’t clear if she even knew her son had been arrested. He was being held without bail.

“He’s a good kid,” Norma Perez, 69, a family friend, told the Daily News. “I just know he’s not like that.”

The Urban Assembly school is an intermediate and high school housed in a giant red brick building in the Bronx that also includes an elementary school. There are about 1,100 students there.

It was the first homicide inside a New York City school since 1993, when a 15-year-old student stabbed a classmate to death at a junior high school in Manhattan. That killing came during a stretch that saw four students killed in public schools in 12 months — violence that prompted schools to start installing metal detectors.

The Bronx school was open Thursday. The mayor and schools chancellor were there, and grief counselors were on site. The students were scanned for weapons Thursday, but the building didn’t have metal detectors — police said there hadn’t been a need for them.

City officials and parents have debated for years whether the school system should be installing more metal detectors or taking them away because of the stigma of attending a school deemed unsafe enough to require a weapons check.

“After yesterday’s incident, of course we’re going to evaluate what goes on throughout the school system,” Police Commissioner James O’Neill said. “Our goal, of course, is to keep the children as safe as possible.”

Deadly violence inside city school buildings is rare, though there has been violence outside, on school property. In 2014, a fight between two 14-year-old boys ended with one stabbed to death outside a Bronx school.