A high school runner is facing criminal charges after striking and injuring another runner with a baton earlier this month.
During a 4×200-meter indoor relay race at the Virginia state championships in Lynchburg on March 4, Kaelen Tucker passed Alaila Everett, who then swung her arm, striking Ms. Tucker in the head with the baton.
Ms. Tucker brought a hand to her head, fell to the track and did not finish the race. Her family said that she had sustained a concussion.
Ms. Everett now faces a misdemeanor charge of assault and battery, said Bethany Harrison, the commonwealth attorney for the city of Lynchburg. Ms. Everett’s team, I.C. Norcom of Portsmouth, Va., was disqualified from the race.
What exactly happened, and why, is a matter of dispute.
Indoor track, and indoor relays in particular, can be rough. Limited space and fast athletes lead to jostling, collisions and falls. The 4×200 is the shortest and fastest relay event that is commonly run indoors, and the runners do not stay in their lanes, meaning they are in close quarters.
“As we got around the curve she kept bumping me in my arm and then finally when we got off the curve I , like, slowly started passing her, and then that’s when she just hit me with a baton, and I fell off the track,” Ms. Tucker told the local TV station WSLS.
“To see that they kept running, and she did not stop and check on my daughter, it couldn’t have been an accident,” her mother, Tamarrow Tucker, mother said on “Good Morning America.”
But Ms. Everett and her family disputed that she intentionally struck her fellow runner.
“She was so close to me that my baton kept hitting her,” Ms. Everett told the local station WAVY. “I lost my balance and then I pumped my arms again and she got hit. She was cutting in when it happened — she should have waited a little bit longer. But she cut in too quick. She was so close to me she got hit.”
“I would never hit somebody on purpose,” Ms. Everett said through tears.
Her father said he saw the incident as part of the rough and tumble of a relay. “When the young lady cut her off, my daughter couldn’t pump her arm; no control where your arms go,” Mr. Everett told WVEC. “She can only apologize on the news, and she’s done it already several times.”
Under track rules, runners can’t cut in front of the runners they pass until they are a stride length, or about six feet, in front. Vincent Pugh, a former athletic director for Portsmouth Public Schools, told WAVY that Ms. Tucker had not had that margin. He also said that he believed the video did not show that the baton strike had been intentional.
The families of Ms. Tucker and Ms. Everett did not respond to requests for further comment.
The moment in the race became a prominent episode on social media, drawing many comments, including from those who are not normally track fans. Some of those opinions were far from nuanced.
The local N.A.A.C.P. chapter said that the Everett family had been the target of racial slurs and death threats, and said of Ms. Everett that “she has carried herself with integrity both on and off the field, and any narrative that adjudicates her guilty of any criminal activity is a violation of her due process rights.”
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