Kentucky teacher who attacked black student fired
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The teacher was filmed viciously attacking and pinning down a 16-year-old student.
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William Bennett pinned a Black student to the floor on school grounds. (Twitter/Facebook)
William Bennett, a teacher who was filmed pinning down a Black student on the school ground, has been terminated from his position at the school.
Bennett was a one-time science teacher at the school, Marion C Moore, and made inappropriate and provoking comments to the teenager, which caused the altercation.
According to Insider's details regarding the termination letter, Bennett had "escalated the situation."
Since the video went viral in August, the teacher had been assigned to "non-instructional duties," by the County.
The letter details that the student, Jamir Strane, initially punched the teacher in his head due to provoking comments, which led to Bennett pinning the student to the ground and later pulling his hair.
Strane was suspended for 10 days and faced an assault charge over the incident.
According to Strane, the fight began when Bennett told him he would "be another black boy shot...You're going to end up in the streets dead." Strane was wearing a neck gaiter at the time and says the comments were due to his attire.
The teen claims he was reminded of his friends who had died amid gun violence, and he himself sustained a gunshot injury in a drive-by shooting in 2020.
A questionable past
Most surprisingly is the fact that Bennett has a past record of questionable behavior. He previously grabbed a student who was misbehaving in 1999, called a noisy class "a bunch of monkeys" decades ago, and lost his job in Louisville in 2001 after he broke into an apartment to check if his girlfriend was cheating on him.
Bennett is also famed for cracking sexual jokes and labeling students who did not laugh as "Nazi humorists", according to his employment file at Elizabethtown. In 2018, he ran for Elizabethtown City Council, telling a local source that his "parents and grandparents instilled in me at an early age the importance of Christian charity, service to others, a good education, and that public service is a calling, not a career."
In the past, he was suspended without pay for allegedly saying things like "I could just slap you," "I love guns; I love the Second Amendment; take it away, I shoot you," and "feminists are modern-day Nazis."
It has been reported that when he applied to the Jefferson County Public Schools, he did not provide a record of his previous offenses.
Strane's mother has filed a lawsuit against Bennett and the Jefferson County Public School board.
