Reports of 'swarming' at N.B. high school were inaccurate, principal says

The multiple social media posts spread like wildfire: A swarm of about 40 teenagers had allegedly taunted and attacked another teenager at Fredericton High School, leaving him bleeding on the ground.

The posts, which prompted a police investigation, told a dramatic story of high school violence in a week that had already seen a vicious brawl and knife incident at Oromocto High School, warnings of the "potential for violence" at both Fredericton and Oromocto high schools and a subsequent police presence at both of the schools.

But according to Fredericton High School principal Stephanie Underhill Tomilson, the "swarming" wasn't a swarming at all.

In an interview Monday with CBC New Brunswick News, Underhill Tomilson recounted a different version of the events of last Thursday.

Underhill Tomilson said that at around noon hour, staff heard that there was a fight was underway.

Police were already onsite due to previous information, received the night before, about an unspecified "potential for violence" at the school, so Underhill Tomilson asked them if they'd heard or seen anything.

They had not, she said, so they walked around the perimeter of the campus to have a look. They saw nothing untoward, no groups of students milling about and buzzing excitedly.

"Of course, by the time you go outside ... the fight is normally done," she said. But "we met up with the teacher and she said, 'I was there. I saw the whole thing. I pulled up in my car. ... I blared my horn. I can identify who they are.' "

From there, she said, they went back in to check the cameras and begin going through the various feeds.

"And then all of a sudden we have a teacher that comes up to us and says, 'Have you seen this Facebook post?' And so we took a look at it and we're like, what? A swarm?"

It was mystifying, Underhill Tomilson said. 

"If there was a swarm, there would have been more action. We would have heard about it," she said. "The kids would be talking about it after lunch. There's nothing. Did we miss it? And so we had to go through other areas with our cameras to try to figure out where did this happen and how did this happen."

Eventually, she said, it became clear to her that the incident the teacher had seen and that was captured by two different cameras was the only incident that had transpired.

And it was "totally different" from the swarming that Facebook posts were reporting.