Armed with video of son’s brutal beating, she sought justice. But was she too late?
A student in a yellow shirt casually strolls around the perimeter of the room until he gets to 10th-grader Ean Hughes’s desk, where he stops and glowers down at his classmate for a couple of beats.
Then, suddenly, the student in the yellow shirt explodes into violence, pummeling Hughes with a blizzard of punches — nearly two dozen — and twice kicking him in the back before the video abruptly ends.
But the video didn’t really stop there. Within hours, it had gone viral at Bessemer City High School in Gaston County, where the outburst occurred.
“They were sending it around the school like fireflies,” said Melissa Le ann Jones, Ean’s mother.
In the days that followed, the student body moved on to other things, and the video never circulated, in any significant way, beyond that population. “But I’d told his girlfriend at the time, I said, ‘If anybody sends it to you, send it straight to me. Because I’m gonna need it in the future.’”
And on Wednesday — more than eight months after the incident, which happened in a Math 1 class last Sept. 17 — Jones finally decided that she needed it.
With that, the 27-second cellphone video that showed the attack on her son went up on her Facebook page, along with what she hoped would be a call to action regarding her son’s case that also doubled as a bit of a public shaming of her local government.
“Gastonia county courts have yet to still do anything to this young man for what he done to my son,” Jones wrote in her post. “Please share so Ean can get Justice.”
Her plea worked even better than she could have imagined, in one way: The video has been shared more than 3,000 times and has garnered nearly 100,000 views.
As for justice? Well, that could prove to be far more elusive than anticipated, Jones is just now realizing.
‘He’s gone through a lot’
Ean Hughes has certainly been through worse.
On Mother’s Day in 2013, when he was 9 years old and the family was living in Marion (just east of Asheville, near Lake James), Ean was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of leukemia. The next day, he started chemotherapy.
In the months that followed, he had numerous rounds of port chemo, but also had chemo injected into his spine. As word spread of his battle, his tiny hometown rallied behind him in a number of ways; for instance, a third-grade classmate at Pleasant Gardens Elementary School organized an event featuring a hot dog dinner and a bouncy house to help raise money for his family, and later, the National Guard Armory in Marion hosted a silent auction to offset the cost of their medical bills.
He eventually went into remission, but the cancer came back about 3-1/2 years ago, and he had to submit to the regimen of punishing treatments all over again.
“He’s gone through a lot for being only 16 years old,” Jones said, “and there was times that we didn’t know if Ean was gonna make it home from the hospital.”
By the time the family moved to Bessemer City in 2017, Ean was in remission again, but — as is common among survivors of childhood leukemia, according to the National Institutes of Health — the intensive treatments impaired his growth and he is shorter than the average boy his age. (He’s about 5 feet 6 inches and 125 pounds.)
Jones said her son had never been in a fight before and had never gotten into trouble at school. Ean said he mostly kept to himself at school unless he was around his friends from the baseball team.
But on that day in his Math 1 class, he spoke up when another student decided to stand in front of the whiteboard as Ean was trying to solve the problems the teacher had written on it.
“Before it all happened, the teacher and me both asked him to sit down,” Ean said.
“When I asked him to sit down, he asked me if I wanted to fight. I told him no. ... He asked me about five or six times, and then he went and sat down. ... Probably about three minutes (later) ... he walked over. And the pencil sharpener’s right behind me, so I wasn’t paying him no attention at all. And then he just started whaling on me.”
‘Scared to go to school’
Jones said the school suspended the teenager for 365 days following the attack on Ean, who suffered a concussion and bruised ribs. (Bessemer City High School principal Sheila Wyont referred questions to Gaston County Schools; Todd Hagans, the district’s chief communications officer, said “we cannot share specific information related to student discipline because of privacy ... but please know that the school addressed this situation when it happened and took disciplinary action.”)
A report also was filed by the Gaston County Police Department, charging the student with misdemeanor simple assault as a juvenile.
Though he was well enough physically to return earlier, Ean remained out for three days after the incident because he “was just really scared to go to school,” his mother said, and in the weeks that followed he pleaded successfully to stay home on other days here and there. He also asked his mother whether she would consider home-schooling him.
Yet this wasn’t even close to the most traumatic event that would befall their family.
Less than four weeks after Ean was attacked, his older sister — 19-year-old Annie Hope Martino, an airman basic in the Air Force — committed suicide while serving at the McConnell base in Wichita, Kan.
A hometown hero in Marion (population about 8,000), crowds of people stood along Exit 86 off of Interstate 40 when her body was returned to the area, and the Air Force provided full military honors for Martino at her funeral at McDowell Memorial Park.
Jones said her only daughter had been battling depression and homesickness. But she also said “she was very highly upset” by what had happened to Ean. “She called the school and let them know how she felt about it and she wanted justice to be served. Before she died, she reiterated many times that she didn’t want me to just let this go.”
And though life was upside down for her family, just six days after burying her daughter, Jones attended the first hearing regarding her son’s case at the Gaston County Courthouse in October, as did the teacher and the school resource officer. The assailant and his family, she said, did not show. So a continuance was issued.
November, same thing: Jones, Ean, the teacher and the school resource officer appeared in court. The other student did not. Continuance.
In early December, Jones and Ean left Bessemer City and moved back to Marion (she said the incident wasn’t the main reason, but noted “a lot of violence in that area” as “one of the reasons we moved”); but her husband — from whom she is currently separated, and who still lives in her old house — forwarded the December summons to her.
So she drove the 75 miles back to court, and again, the other student failed to appear.
After that, she said, she never heard from Gaston County again.
“Nobody will call me back, so I haven’t had any communication with them,” Jones told the Observer on Thursday. “I feel like it’s not a big deal to them.”
But then, on Friday morning, she was given some news that surprised and upset her almost as much as the video did.
‘Someone failed somewhere’
When contacted by the Observer on Friday, Gaston County chief court counselor Carol McManus said the case was heard and dismissed. More than three months ago — in February.
She said Ean and his mother failed to appear.
When the Observer called Melissa Le ann Jones to relay that information, her response was: “Really.” She was silent for three seconds. Then: “So they dropped charges on him?”
Jones repeatedly denied ever being summoned a fourth time, and reiterated that no one from Gaston County has returned her phone calls.
As to whether it’s possible her move to Marion could have made it difficult for a summons to reach her, she again stated that her husband, Tim Jones, had forwarded her the summons for the December court date — and that he had not received anything since.
So we reached out to Tim Jones. His response: “If so, I would have made sure my wife got it. ... This kid was trying to kill my (step)son, or hurt him really bad. ... Just imagine if that was your child. It breaks my heart every time I see this video, but sir, I have not received anything in February.”
Malia Swift, the math teacher who was in the room on the day of the assault (and who can be heard screaming at the attacker to stop), told the Observer in an email that she was at the three hearings in the fall, but that she also did receive a summons for a fourth hearing in February. She said she showed up and it was dismissed.
It’s not clear whether the defendant and/or his family were present. Swift didn’t respond to further questions.
Meanwhile, after we asked McManus, the court counselor, whether the defendant appeared at the February hearing, the N.C. Department of Public Safety’s deputy communications director, Diana Kees, replied on McManus’s behalf to say that juvenile records are confidential and “we are unable to discuss any aspect of the case.”
Larry Brown, clerk of Superior Court in Gaston County, told us the same thing.
“I’m really angry. Really,” Ean’s mother said. “Someone failed somewhere to get me the papers to show us our new court date. And how can he (the defendant) not show up for three times so it just keeps getting continued and keeps getting continued, but the one time we don’t show up, we don’t even get a continuance? The one day we don’t show up they just throw it out of court — instead of giving us another option or another time like they did for him every single time — ?”
“I mean, if I showed up three times even after my daughter passed away, I would have showed up for the one in February. I wouldn’t have just not came.”
And then about five hours later, on Friday afternoon, she called back with news of her own:
She had just gotten off the phone with a captain at the Gaston County Sheriff’s Department, she said, who confirmed that there was no record on file of a subpoena for her or for Ean for a February court date.
Before she hung up, she said, the captain suggested she could get a lawyer.
So, is she going to?
“Yes,” Jones said. “I believe I am.”
This story was originally published May 29, 2020 at 4:06 PM.
