Carnage Middle School Aide Charged With Kicking Disabled Student in Stomach

Carnage Middle School special education assistant Jyl Angelina Crockett kicked a disabled student in the stomach during a March 13 incident at the Raleigh school, court documents say, sending the child stumbling backward. Crockett, 57, turned herself in to the Wake County Sheriff's Office on April 2 and was charged with misdemeanor assault on an individual with a disability, a charge state law treats as a distinct offense because of the particular vulnerability of people with disabilities.

A warrant filed by sheriff's deputies describes Crockett kicking the student in the mid-section and causing the student to stumble backward. The investigation ran roughly three weeks before deputies filed the warrant on the same day Crockett surrendered. She was released on a $2,000 secured bond and is scheduled for her first court appearance on April 30.

Wake County Public Schools confirmed Crockett had already been removed from the district before her arrest and is no longer employed by WCPSS. By this week, her name had been taken down from Carnage Middle's staff page, where she had been listed as a special programs instructional assistant.

Her case is the third time in less than 12 months that a Wake County school employee has been arrested for allegedly assaulting a student with a disability. In May 2025, Carver Elementary teacher Scott Allen Swartzfager, 47, of Wendell, was charged with five counts of felony assault after allegedly harming five students, ages 5 to 10, on a single school day. That September, Rolesville High School special education teacher Jodi Ellen Catt, 56, was charged with misdemeanor assault after allegedly kicking a disabled student who was seated in class. Crockett's April 2 arrest is the third such case since May 2025.

The pattern lands inside a well-documented structural problem in special education settings: students with significant disabilities are often nonverbal or otherwise unable to report harm on their own, leaving them dependent on bystander staff, security cameras, and mandatory reporting protocols to surface mistreatment. A prior investigation into former East Wake High teacher James Rencher found the district had received internal reports of his abuse for 20 months before notifying law enforcement, a delay now at the center of a federal lawsuit against WCPSS that a judge allowed to proceed in August 2025.

Under North Carolina law, school employees are mandatory reporters of suspected abuse and neglect. Staff assigned to students covered by Individualized Education Programs must operate within the behavioral intervention protocols those plans specify, and physical contact outside those boundaries can itself constitute a criminal act regardless of whether the conduct is charged as a felony or misdemeanor.

What parents can do: Submit written concerns to the school principal and request any incident documentation involving your child. File a formal grievance through wcpss.net/report-grievance; for violations of special education law specifically, submit a formal written complaint to the NC Department of Public Instruction's Exceptional Children Division at state_ec_complaints@dpi.nc.gov. Suspected criminal conduct should be reported directly to the Wake County Sheriff's Office. Disability Rights NC, at disabilityrightsnc.org, provides free legal advocacy for students with disabilities and can assist families navigating both school-level disputes and law enforcement processes.

Prosecutors will decide whether to proceed with the misdemeanor charge when Crockett appears in Wake County court on April 30.