A high school senior and honor student in Massachusetts has been stripped of her title as captain of the volleyball team and suspended for five games.
Erin Cox's crime? Being caught earlier this month with several other teens at an underage drinking party--where Cox headed to pick up a friend who was too drunk to drive.
The 17-year-old North Andover High School student received a call from a friend who was allegedly intoxicated and asked her to pick her up from a party in Boxford, the Boston Herald reported.
"If a kid asks for help from a friend, you don't want that kid to say 'I'm sorry I can't help you. I might end up in trouble at school,'" attorney Wendy Murphy, who is trying to help the Cox family get the school's decision reversed, told CBS Boston.
Cox drove to the Main Street home where the party was held and found her friend just in time to be there when the police showed up.
"I wasn't drinking," she told the Boston Herald. "And I felt like going to get her was the right thing to do. Saving her from getting in the car when she was intoxicated and [could] hurt herself or getting in the car with someone else who was drinking. I'd give her a ride home."
While Cox was cleared by police, who agreed she had not been drinking and was not in possession of alcohol, Andover High told the honor student she was in violation of the district's zero tolerance policy against alcohol and drug use.
"She's very fragile and I'm worried about her," mom Eleanor Cox told CBS Boston. "Very worried about her. She didn't do anything wrong."
Geoffrey Bok, who represented the high school in court Friday (when Eleanor Cox's lawsuit went nowhere), said once police became involved, there was little choice.
"The school is really trying to take a very serious and principled stand regarding alcohol," he said
Erin Cox told the Boston Herald, "I just feel very defeated. When you're in high school you're supposed to stay perfect and be perfect, but everyone makes mistakes." When asked if, knowing what she knows now, getting her friend was a mistake, she said she would do it all over again.
"It was the right thing," she said.
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