A 13-year-old girl walked out of a bathroom at Mayer High School in Yavapai County, Arizona, and three eighth-grade boys opened fire on her with foam dodgeballs. She ended up in the hospital with softball-sized bruises on her rib cage and abdomen. One of the boys was her ex-boyfriend, Abel Schipper. He told the deputy who interviewed him, “I’m not going to lie. I did target her a little bit.”
A little bit.
Abel’s mother, Cecily Schipper, has been making the rounds on local television calling the misdemeanor assault charge “absolutely ridiculous.” Her framing is familiar to anyone who has ever sat through a community meeting about accountability: this is just a game every kid plays, the system is overreacting, her son is the real victim here. She even told AZFamily she has text messages from the girl asking for rides home after the incident, as if a 13-year-old’s survival politicking toward the mother of a boy who just sent her to the hospital proves anything except that children are terrified of making things worse for themselves.
Let’s be clear about what the police report describes. A Banner Health social worker, not the girl’s mother, contacted the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office two days after the December 2025 incident. The social worker said the boys “relentlessly assaulted her with dodgeballs when she came out of the bathroom.” The girl’s mother photographed two bruises, blue and purple, one on her upper right rib cage and one on her lower right abdomen. This was not a game. This was three boys coordinating to ambush a specific girl, one of their exes, at a moment when she was vulnerable. They chose their target. Abel said so himself.
“Obviously I’m going to have to target somebody for dodgeball,” Abel told AZFamily. “It’s dodgeball. You have to choose somebody.” He also volunteered that his ex “used to hit me a lot and then she kind of just broke it off after that,” which is a remarkable thing to say to a television camera when you are the one facing an assault charge. He is 13, and he has already absorbed the cultural script: minimize your own violence, center your own grievance, recast a girl’s rejection as her aggression.
Isaack Gilsemans (Public domain) via Wikimedia CommonsCecily Schipper did gesture toward a real systemic failure when she noted that the school never contacted her, that her son was never disciplined, and that she didn’t learn a deputy had interviewed him on school grounds until months later when a letter arrived from the Yavapai County Juvenile Justice Center. Schools interrogating children without parental notification is a due process problem, and it disproportionately harms families with fewer resources to push back. But that critique cuts against the school’s inaction, not against the charge. The school let this incident pass with zero response. The system that failed Abel’s mother is the same system that failed the girl who was hospitalized.
The real question is not whether a foam ball is a weapon. It is why three boys felt entitled to punish a girl who broke up with one of them, why the school did nothing, and why a mother’s first instinct is to defend her son on television rather than ask what kind of harm he caused. A judge is scheduled to hear the case. Two of the three boys plan to appear and defend themselves. The girl and her mother have not spoken publicly.
Every kid in the nation plays dodgeball. Not every kid in the nation uses it to corner a girl outside a bathroom and send her to the hospital. The difference is not the game. It is the culture that teaches boys they can target a girl and count on adults to call it play.