A 12-year-old sixth grader died after choking at Justice Sonia Sotomayor Community School in Yonkers just before noon, after school staff tried to resuscitate him and could not save him. He was later pronounced dead at the hospital.
Yonkers Public Schools Superintendent said the boy started choking and became unresponsive during the medical emergency at the Westchester County school. Police are investigating the incident as classmates and teachers rally around a community left shocked and grieving.
The death puts a sudden and painful stop to an ordinary school day in Yonkers, where the focus now is on the sixth grader’s classmates, teachers and the staff who tried to help him. The question that remains unanswered is what caused the choking in the first place, and investigators have not said.
The school sits in Westchester County and has become the center of a community response that is still forming around a loss no one there could have expected. For now, the police investigation continues, and the facts point to a child who was resuscitated at school but died anyway before the day was over.
