A quick-thinking teacher at a Florida school followed what she thought was a trail of juice — but it led her instead to a student bleeding to death after he was stabbed by his own pencil.
The harrowing ordeal, which occurred at Equestrian Trails Elementary in Wellington, unfolded last week when third-grader Kolston Moradi placed a sharpened pencil in the side pocket of his backpack, Palm Beach County officials said.
Later in the day, Moradi sat down and the pencil impaled his arm near the armpit — with the point piercing four inches deep and puncturing an artery.
Moradi’s saving grace was teacher Mandi Kapopoulos who said she noticed what looked like a trail of juice in the hallway, according to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
The trail led her to the bleeding student.
“He wasn’t screaming or crying or saying anything,” Kapopoulos said. “There were pools of blood at his feet and his whole shirt was covered in blood.”
It could only be described as a “freak accident,” school officials said of the Nov 1. incident.
“I didn’t really feel anything,” Moradi told school officials. “But when I went to put [the pencil] in my backpack, I realized it was in me, and I pulled it out.”
Kapopoulos used her shirt as a tourniquet in an attempt to save him.
With the help of another teacher and the school nurse, they calmed the boy, worked to stop the bleeding, and called emergency services.
The boy’s mother, Annalisa Moradi, was outside the school waiting to pick her son up when the teachers suddenly rushed her inside the building.
“When I saw the ambulance, my heart sank,” she told school officials.
The child was taken to a hospital where he received two staples in his arm.
He returned to school the next day.