A violent Tuesday afternoon stabbing sent a middle school teenager to the hospital in East Orange.
According to reports and residents in the area, the incident occured shortly before 4 p.m. on Park Avenue when the stabbing victim and another person were walking home from The Sojouner Truth Middle School Campus when the pair came under attack by unidentified assailants.
According to witnesses, during the scuffle, one of the assailants pulled a sharp object and stabbed the teen in the back.
The vicim was transported to University Hospital in Newark where his condition was not released.
Residents in the area of the middle school complex formerly known as "Hart Middle" said that they have expressed constant (sometimes daily) complaints of fights that erupt outside their homes by students who form into groups then engage in physical confrontations near their homes.
"The kids fight almost every day during the conclusion of school" a Hamilton Street resident said.
In 2003, The New Jersey Department of Education listed the Patrick Healy Middle School among seven schools they identified as ''persistently dangerous'' schools according to a New York Times report.
The designation has since been removed from the middle school according to reports.
A spokesperson for the mayor's office would only say that the altercation did not take place in the school and referred all questions to the East Orange Police public information lieutenant who did not return calls for general information since Tuesday.
The incident remains under investigation.