Footage taken on someone’s smartphone caught the shocking moment when a high school track athlete bludgeoned a fellow runner over the head with a baton in the middle of a relay, leaving the girl with severe head injuries.
Brookville High School junior Kaelen Tucker had just rounded a turn in the 4x200M relay final during the Virginia High School League (VHSL) Class 3 State Indoor Championships on Tuesday and was charging toward the finish line when Alaila Everett, a competitor with IC Norcom High School, reared her arm back and beamed Tucker in the head with her own baton. The assault sent Tucker careening off the track and onto the ground as the crowd audibly gasped.
"When we got to the curve she kept bumping me in my arm and when we got off the curve I finally passed her and that was when she hit me with the baton," Tucker said later, recounting that she was trying to get around Everett safely until she suddenly felt a searing back in the back of her head.
The injury left Tucker with a concussion and a possible skull fracture, while Everett and her team were immediately disqualified from the race. To make matters even worse, after the assault, Tucker and her family said they never even got so much as an apology from Tucker or her high school, who they claim didn't seem to care that their athlete had just attacked another runner.
“They were beside us at the event. They were watching the video at the event, but no one apologized or came to check on her,” Tucker’s parents told local reporters. “Even if it was a fluke or freak accident, you still would check on her.”
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For her part, the baton-wielding cheater says the whole thing has been a misunderstanding, and that no one is taking her feelings into account.
“Like, you’re physically hurt, but you’re not thinking of my mental, right?” a sobbing Everett blubbered during an interview this week, suggesting that the girl with the potential crack in her cranium should probably be considering her assailant’s emotional state first.
Just can’t make this stuff up.
Everett then blamed the “angle” of the video for making it seem like she purposefully hit Tucker in the head, claiming “my baton got stuck behind her back like this and it rolled up her back, I lost my balance and when I pumped my arms again, she got hit.”
The best part about a whopper like that one is that in 2025, everything is caught on video, and it’s awfully hard to fudge the truth when everyone can see it, plain as day.