'I Was Attacked By a Third-Grader'

Sure, maybe now I can see why there's a movement afoot to abolish dodgeball in schools. You have chumps like this getting into fights with 11-year-olds.

A substitute gym teacher turned into a schoolyard bully after he got into a fight with an 11-year-old Westchester student over a dodgeball game, called him a "crybaby," and put him in a chokehold, New Rochelle police said.

Daniel Sanabria, 58, of New Rochelle, denied putting the boy in a chokehold and said he didn't call him any names.

"I was attacked by a third-grader," Sanabria told The Post yesterday.

The ball brawl began in the gym of the Daniel Webster Elementary School on Friday when, during a game of dodgeball, Sanabria ruled the student out.

"[The boy] insisted he was never out," Sanabria said. "He wouldn't sit out when I asked him to."

The boy's homeroom teacher arrived to escort the student to the principal's office.

But things escalated when "the kid was walking away, and the gym teacher started calling him things like 'a big baby' and 'crybaby,' " Detective Thomas Leak told the Journal News yesterday.

Sanabria "pushes the student's head into a wall, then throws him onto the ground," Capt. Joseph Schaller, of the New Rochelle Police Department, told The Post.

"He picks him up from the ground by wrapping his arm around his neck and body, causing the student substantial pain."

Schaller said the student has marks on his right arm from where the teacher grabbed him and that Sanabria "contends the kid threw a punch" first.

I'm not quite sure what an 11-year-old is doing in third grade, but maybe this knucklehead was a little confused after the melee. Maybe it was really a fifth-grader he picked a fight with.