Suffolk Karate Teacher Tries To Recover
"Come here!" Susan Bateman calls cheerily to a youngster across the room of her husband's karate studio in Suffolk, Jeff Bateman's School of Karate. "Jump up now!"
Her visitor roars over, and leaps into the air. Laughing, Susan catches the family dog, and relaxes in a corner of the large room.
As she looks around the room, the teacher (or Sensei, in the spoken art of Japanese martial arts) feels her smile slowly drop from her face. A year ago, the school would have been milling with dozens of youngsters and parents; the children looking to learn what she had to teach, their parents ready to watch and cheer in pride. But tonight (and for quite some time now) she and her furry friend are the only ones in class - and according to her and quite a few others, it's all because of a falsehood.
"I like making the kids laugh," says Susan, who started teaching at the school in 1999, one year before receiving her black belt. "I like making the kids laugh, helping them have fun and learn something. I always liked making games for the kids, rather than the standard routine of running and jumping."
She'd have elimination-type contests to see who could sit or lay down the fastest. The kids would do sit-ups, kicks, punches, and other exercises to demonstrate their prowess.
Over the summer of 2007, Susan noticed that some of her students were getting a bit nonchalant with their pushups. Some of the kids were arching their backs; others were leaning too far down in the middle, suddenly resembling a watermelon rind.
"I took the top of my foot and pushed their backs down or pressed their stomachs up," she said. "It made them stay flat."
Eventually, it became another contest of sorts - Susan, who divided her time between the Suffolk school and her husband's similar establishments in Hampton, started helping her students develop their toughness - on the inside and outside - with a foot-tapping exercise, one similar to techniques used by instructors across the country. Once in a while, her students would get down in a pushup-type position, and she'd drum the top of her foot against their stomach (imagine getting hit with a brand-new pillow).
"I told them to tell me if they wanted me to stop," she said. "Every five hits, I'd ask if they wanted to quit. Their shirts took most of the impact.
"I think that they thought it was toughening up their stomach. Anytime a black belt does something to a kid, they think that a black belt is using a lot of force, but we're not, because we're controlled. They thought it was fun."
Eventually, students from kindergarten to adulthood took part in the workout. Some were able to brag to their friends that they'd taken 100 whacks, and others even more.
On the evening of Nov. 7, some of her students were about ready to display their karate spirit in Suffolk (classes typically spend about half an hour doing calisthenics, the other half focusing solely on karate). Some of the students wanted to show their stomach prowess.
One 11-year-old, a four-month veteran of the school, hereafter referred to as the pseudonym David, put his hands and feet on the ground, and Susan went to work (she says he'd taken part in the workout before). As the rest of the class cheered him on, the youngster withstood 50, then 100, then 150 knocks. At 207, he decided he'd had enough.
"He was excited," Susan said. "He jumped up, happy. People congratulated him."
King's Fork Middle School student Andrew Barnes was next on the list. He got down to action, and didn't get back up until Susan had landed her 211th leg lift.
"It felt like any other exercise," Andrew remembers. "I was tired, but not hurting. She'd done it before, and it never hurt. I was pretty proud of myself." According to Susan, David wanted to go again after seeing his classmate's achievement. But it was time for class, and the students took a small step toward their own black belts.
Susan didn't attend the next night's lesson, but David did, according to Jeff.
"That lesson included sparring," Jeff says. "I actually had to calm him down because he was so aggressive."
That Saturday, the Batemans received a puzzling e-mail from David's family.
"They said they were concerned, that he had a bruise on his stomach, and blood in his urine," Susan recalls, her face seeming to grow as she speaks. "We e-mailed them back, saying we'd be glad to talk to them, but they never e-mailed us back. We'd never had anything like this happen before."
Still, nothing happened for another few weeks. Then one night, the phone rang at Jeff's Suffolk studio.
It was a detective, wanting to speak with his wife.
"Initially, I was kind of nervous," Susan recalls. "If he had a bruise, I wanted to make sure they didn't think a parent or guardian had hit him. I figured, I'd go speak to the detective, my story would match (David's) story, and that would be the end of it."
Still, speaking to the officer, she got the impression that something worse was on its way, and quickly.
"He made a statement that this kind of activity didn't work, that it was counterproductive," she says. "I could tell that something was happening."
It did - and she never dreamed how horrible it would be. Four days later, the detectives called again, and Susan learned that there was a warrant for her arrest - for felony child abuse.
She didn't know what to do.
"I cried all the way to the police station," she says (Jeff says his wife didn't sleep for three days afterward). "A guilty person hides from the police. I just went to turn myself in." After forking over $1,500 in bail, she was let go.
But the story was just starting on its wildfire-esque spread. Her sad, tear-swollen face was shown in a mug shot that ran to all the local newspapers. Local television and radio news shows picked up the story. Blogs appeared on the Internet, in an uproar about the teacher that beat her students, that was a disgrace to the martial arts. Nationwide web sites took the story to the far reaches of the country. People started calling the school, threatening Jeff and Susan and demanding that Susan never be allowed near children again. There was a black eye on Susan, on the school, on Suffolk, and on karate itself.
"I think the hardest part was seeing it on TV," she said. "I had no idea going to be on TV. People who didn't know me were making negative comments. It was like I'd already been tried and convicted."
Depressed, she tried to help her son, himself a black belt and instructor at the school, make it through his senior year of high school.
"I knew it was tough on him," she said. "He was very angry."
After taking some time off, Susan gingerly made her way back to the Hampton school, her mindset disrupted and her confidence shattered.
"All the times I was teaching karate, I thought I knew why kids took karate, and now I'm not so sure," she says. "I thought parents had their kids in karate for the same reason that I had my son in karate when he was four - so that when he grew up, he would be able to defend himself. Not to beat somebody or fight, but to defend themselves. I don't know if parents know what karate is - it's a contact sport when people have to touch, have to kick, have to punch. You have to toughen up your body parts so that you can defend yourself. We shouldn't have to ask the parent, 'How would you like us to teach your child?'"
At the school, she didn't have to; her students were there to greet her - and slowly, things started to turn around.
"I got cards from my son's friends, teachers, and other people, expressing support, saying that they knew it wasn't true," she says.
That Christmas, students from Suffolk and Hampton gathered at their annual banquet to socialize, and join to vote for their favorite teacher of the year. When the results came in, Susan couldn't believe it - in a good way.
For the first time in her teaching career, she'd won.
"I cried," she says. "It was hard to believe that after so many ugly things were said about me, that people that knew me still cared about me."
In early February, she found a new reason to believe - as Bateman walked into Suffolk Circuit Court for her preliminary hearing, she was greeted by a large group of students decked out in their karate gear.
Around that time, Susan says, she was offered a plea bargain in the case: a guilty plea to a misdemeanor charge of child abuse, one that would result in a 30-day suspended sentence and a two-year ban from teaching.
She said no.
"I'm not guilty of child abuse, and I wasn't going to lower myself to that," she explains. "Admitting to that meant I was guilty, and I wasn't going to accept it and let them take my teaching rights away. That would have drastically, if it hasn't already, ruined my husband's business."
The school was being racked by the infectious rumors - and Susan's indictment in late February on a misdemeanor charge of contributing to the delinquency of a minor (from the same case) didn't help much.
"We only had a couple new students," Jeff says. "It went from 75-80 students, and now I have maybe 12. It's suffered tremendously. I can't guarantee that that's all because of (the accusation), but it's really coincidental, with me being here for 25 years, that it would drop the way it did."
Originally slated for April, the trial was postponed until Aug. 28 when defense attorney Mike Fasanaro needed time to prepare a witness. Last Thursday, he and Susan headed into Judge Westbrook Parker's Suffolk Circuit Courtroom. Once again, dozens of Susan's friends and students had come to cheer her on.
"I wanted to go there to show my support," says Brandon Moody, 12. "Most people were sad, because she'd worked so hard for us."
Prosecutor Jim Wiser got the state's case rolling.
"Our general position was that the actions of the defense went beyond what normal incidental contact would be appropriate in an environment like this," he explains. "This was not something, the amount of strikes or kicks to a child, or a student, that should not be left to the child or student. It's the responsibility of a person holding themselves out to be professional to make that judgment call."
David's mother and his doctor described finding blood in the child's urine, and that the child had complained of stomach pain.
Another karate teacher testified that Bateman's tapping exercise was, to coin a phrase, cruel and unusual. The boy got on the stand and testified that Bateman had never asked him if he wanted her to stop.
In the audience, Susan dropped and shook her head. "I felt bad for the child," she says. "Everybody else in that room (that night) had heard me ask him that."
She started the defense''s case, in a short testimony about the event. She demonstrated her tapping motion by rapping a board. Three fellow black belt instructors testified. One spoke of Susan's character, the others of the effectiveness of the technique. A doctor, himself a karate enthusiast, testified that the blood in the urine could have come from large amounts of exercise, rather than blunt force trauma.
Then a new group of testifiers stepped forward - the students themselves. Andrew hit the stand.
"I felt like they needed to hear what happened," he says. "I told them that it wasn't a hard kick, and it didn't do much of anything." Several others echoed his remarks.
"They were wonderful," Fasanaro says of his little witnesses. "The best kids that I'd ever had. They were that good. No hesitation, no fear of the judges, the lawyers, the bailiffs, anybody. There lot of strange faces, but they were wonderful. I didn't see any slip-ups."
He and Susan hoped Parker wouldn't either. After the closing summations, the judge called everyone into the courtroom.
Parker talked about how karate is a contact sport. He discussed Susan's training of the children, and what it meant. He said that, in order to find her guilty, he'd have to convict virtually every coach, every karate instructor, everyone who ever challenged or made contact with a charge.
In short, it was clear to him that she wasn't guilty.
"Justice was done," Fasanaro says, "and that's a lesson I hope the kids get - somebody might complain against you, but there's also going to be somebody listening.
Nearby, Susan and Jeff felt a pair of 100-pound weights drop off their shoulders. Behind them, the room erupted into cheers.
"I was clapping," Brandon smiles. "That's how I felt, and that's how most people felt. I was happy. Everyone was. She's like a mom to all of us. I walked up and gave her a hug, and said, 'I'm glad you got off!'"
Andrew was close behind.
"It was a relief," he says. "To think that it got carried that far wasn't right. It was a load off of Sensei Susan, just to know that she could live a normal life, just like she used to."
Sadly, Susan's not sure she can - or if she'll ever be able to.
"I hardly come over (to Suffolk) anymore," she says as the first students trickle in for class. "Not because I don't miss the kids, because I do; it's just that the city of Suffolk left a bad taste in my mouth. I was born and raised here; my husband has taught here for over 20 years, in my mind, keeping Suffolk kids off the street. People called us to ask us to do demonstrations as (city festivals) Driver Days and the Peanut Fest, at schools. We did that for the city of Suffolk, and then the city turns their back on me."
Now the city and its residents don't seem to be in any hurry to turn around; though membership at the Hampton school has remained steady, Suffolk's location remains virtually deserted. In August, Susan came back to Suffolk to teach a few classes.
"I'm used to teaching about 15 students per class," she said. "That time, I had two."
Tonight, there's three. Jeff's not sure how many more nights like this his finances can withstand. The family's still five figures in debt, owing to lawyers and witnesses.
"The whole thing was ridiculous," he says. "It's a very expensive burden. For 25 years, I've worked so hard to keep my reputation, and now it seems like it hasn't done me any good. I'm not sure where I'm going to go from here."
