Why I Published Details From a Public Court Filing in the Pelham ERPO Case Involving a 16-Year Old Student

Robert Cox

17 Dec 2025 — 3 min read

DUBLIN, IRELAND (December 17, 2025) — When the Pelham Public Schools superintendent filed an emergency application for a temporary extreme risk protection order (ERPO) against a 16-year-old student charged with armed robbery, the documents entered the public record in Westchester County Supreme Court. As a journalist, I chose to report on that filing, including the student’s name, summaries of his grades and attendance, disciplinary and alleged criminal activity including the context of the robbery charges already covered elsewhere.

Some readers have posted some wildly uninformed claims about my decision - the Superintendent would not make such records public (she did), the student’s privacy rights were violated (they were but not by me), and records filed in New York State Supreme Court are not public by default (they are).

Here are my thoughts on all that.

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