The Beacon High School student who was horrifically burned in a class chemistry experiment gone awry in 2014 testified Friday that he takes off his glasses to avoid seeing strangers’ stares.
“I tried not to look at people directly in the eye. I took my glasses off. Then I can’t really see details far away,” Alonzo Yanes, now 21, said during his second day on the witness stand in his Manhattan Supreme Court civil suit trial.
“This made it easier for me. Then I’m not really focused on peoples’ faces,” Yanes, who now bears scars on his face, neck, arms, hands and legs, continued as his glasses sat folded in front of him in the courtroom.
“The world wasn’t very accepting of the way that I physically looked.”
Yanes — who was 16-years-old when a fireball engulfed him after his teacher Anna Poole performed a botched “Rainbow Experiment” — recalled his friends and sister’s shocked looks when they first visited him in the hospital.
“These were the people closest to me and this is how they were reacting and I don’t know how freshman and sophomores would react to me when I came back. What strangers on the street, how they would react to me,” Yanes said.
Yanes said in the five years since the incident, he hasn’t gotten used to gawkers.
“I will never get used to that,” he said, adding that it still hurts, “tremendously.”
Yanes testified that he hasn’t had sex adding, “The way that I look, it gets in the way too much.
“I don’t think this is very attractive the scars and the pulling,” he said as he gestured to his scars.
Yanes explained that even though he now has little confidence and is self-conscious about how he looks, he is hesitant to get plastic surgery to improve his scarring.
“I’m afraid more surgeries will mean more scars, more cutting up, dealing with more physical therapy, dealing with more people gawking at me in the street,” Yanes said.
“I don’t feel like dealing with that.”
Yanes — who now attends college at the School of Visual Arts studying animation — said he hopes eventually he won’t feel physical and mental pain on a daily basis anymore.
“Not a single day passes by when I don’t think about my injuries or what my life would have been if I wasn’t involved in that injury,” Yanes told jurors.
Yanes and his parents sued the Department of Education and Poole claiming that they neglected basic safety precautions that could have prevented the Jan. 4 2014 incident, including equipping students with goggles.
Yanes said that the grafted skin on his body is tight and pulls all the time. He said he can’t sweat anymore in the places where he was burned and as a result feels hot constantly.
He has trouble sleeping and wakes up with neck pain.
While sleeping, “Sometimes I get visions and I revisit certain moments and sometimes I wake up shaking a little bit,” Yanes said adding that he tries to force himself back to sleep.
He said the visions are “burned into my memory.”
“I’m very afraid because I don’t know when it’s going to end. I don’t see it ending,” Yanes said.
On Tuesday, Yanes emerged in public for the first time to take the witness stand. He recounted in graphic detail the moments when he was “hopelessly burning alive.”
The city claims they shouldn’t be held responsible because it was a freak accident.
After Yanes’ testimony Friday, the defense rested. The trial is expected to go to jurors sometime next week