Over a dozen children at a Brooklyn middle school were sickened yesterday after a classmate opened a bottle containing a noxious brew of cough medicine, authorities said.
A 13-year-old boy was in English class at 10:50 a.m. when his opened bottle sent off a powerful stench through the fourth-floor room at Frederick Douglass Academy VIII on Pennsylvania Avenue in Canarsie, cops said.
Officials described the brew as a syrupy mix of cough medicine and an unknown substance. Police said the substance was not toxic.
Fumes from the bottle, however, made a number of kids queasy; firefighters and paramedics rushed to the scene and treated 20 children. Eleven students were taken to Kings County Hospital and two adults were taken to Brookdale Hospital — all as a precautionary measure, police said.
The school principal did not return an emailed request for comment.
After school, some parents were angry the school never formally notified them of the incident.
“We were not called,” said one mom who asked not to be identified. “I had to see it on the news.”
Another noted she saw helicopters hovering in the neighborhood, “then I saw Hazmat trucks. The principal never called, so I called another mother and she called someone else.”