A teenage girl cowered behind a locked classroom door as roughly 20 students pounded on it for five terrifying minutes, screaming antisemitic slurs and threats to physically assault her for being Jewish, according to a federal lawsuit filed against Seattle Public Schools this week.

After Hamas’s October 7 massacre against Israel, the Jewish freshman became a walking target at Nathan Hale. Referred to in court documents as M.K.L., the 15-year-old who was already receiving special education services for anxiety, endured daily harassment from students who told her to “kill herself,” cornered her to spit in her face, and scrawled swastikas all over school property including on her own belongings and her softball team’s bench.

M.K.L.’s parents repeatedly repoerto Principal William Jackson and Vice Principal Makela Steward-Monroe about the daily abuse, but administrators “failed to meaningfully intervene,” the lawsuit states. School officials refused to provide investigation results or security footage, and never took basic steps like emailing students about the swastikas appearing across campus.

Tahn on May 22, 2024 students repeatedly tried luring M.K.L. out of her classes throughout the day. Her final period teacher grew suspicious when she spotted a crowd forming in the hallway and made a split-second decision to lock M.K.L. inside the classroom.

What happened next was pure terror. Approximately 20 students banged on the door, rattled the handle, and shouted threats and antisemitic slurs while demanding M.K.L. come out. Other students texted her saying the mob “were going to assault her.”

“I rlly rlly rlly need you,” M.K.L. texted her mother before calling her father, who could hear the mob trying to force entry. The teacher told him she was protecting his daughter “from getting beaten up.”

Principal Jackson refused to meet with M.K.L.’s parents in person just days after the mob incident. When they met over Zoom despite Jackson being down the hall, he turned off his camera when they asked about the attack.

Jackson has since left Nathan Hale and now serves as director of teaching and learning for the Bellevue School District.

When M.K.L.’s family requested surveillance footage of the incident, Seattle Public Schools claimed no video existed. But Vice Principal Steward-Monroe had previously told the parents she counted the students outside the classroom using video footage.

“We know that they have cameras because they’ve also released some other unrelated footage,” attorney Seth Rosenberg told the Washington Free Beacon. “They seem to have kept the things that aren’t helpful and apparently not kept the things that are.”

The day after the mob incident, school administrators told M.K.L.’s parents they could no longer provide hallway escorts for her safety. Her parents pulled her from school for the remainder of the year over safety concerns and describe their daughter continuously having “terrifying nightmares and flashbacks.”

“It is impossible to overstate how terrifying this incident was to M.K.L. and her parents,” the complaint states. “M.K.L. believed that if the students were able to access her inside the locked classroom, these students would have physically attacked her, and she feared for her life.”