The Nevada high school freshman shot while he waved two knives at his classmates was attacked by an upperclassman bully just moments earlier, his father said.
Justin Clark said his 14-year-old son, Logan — who remains in a medically induced coma after he was shot in the chest by a campus cop last week — pulled out the knives after another student hit him so hard, his mouth started bleeding.
“You gotta remember that he just got hit two or three times in the face by a kid that’s three years older than him and quite a bit bigger,” he said on NBC’s “Today” Thursday.
Video from the Dec. 7 shooting showed Logan, a freshman at Hug High School in Reno, clutching two knives and lunging at several students in an outside campus courtyard as he bled from the mouth.
Clark maintained that the facial wound came from an altercation with the older bully.
“My son wasn’t just some knife-wielding psychopath,” Clark said. “He wanted to make sure that he wasn’t beat up and robbed.”
A campus police officer fired a single shot at Logan, hitting him in the chest, officials said. A second video from the scene showed the teen lying on the ground, withering in pain.
While school officials and police have praised the cop’s actions, claiming he prevented the teen from harming any other students, Clark insisted that his son was never a threat to anyone else.
He said the cop should have known that his son was attacked before the knife-wielding incident — and maintained he never should have opened fire on a bullying victim.
“That’s a defensive posture, that’s not an attacking posture,” Clark said of his son’s stance in the video. “He’s bleeding from the mouth — obviously something has happened before the video.”
Logan was rushed to a hospital, where he suffered a stroke and required emergency surgery, his family said. A week after the shooting, the teen remains in a medically induced coma.
