Mother speaks out about Canterbury School employee fired for firearm arrest

The mother of a former Canterbury School student is speaking out about an unpleasant encounter with a former school employee who was arrested for carrying a firearm as a convicted felon.

Last week, the former head of security at the school, Wyatt Henderson, was arrested for breaking the terms of his release as a convicted felon.

Stephanie Coller claimed she took her 5-year-old son out of the Canterbury School after an encounter with Henderson.

In August, Coller went to the school to pick up her son early for a family reason. She said Henderson physically intimidated her off of the property because he told her she smelled of marijuana.

Coller said she has Parkinson’s and carries a medical marijuana card with her at all times but did not smoke weed that day and did not have marijuana in her possession at the time.

“Right away, he left a super-bad taste in my mouth, and I was disgusted,” said Coller. “Here we are, first week of the school year, and this man is not allowing me to pick up my child, which was mortifying, like, as a mother. ‘What do you mean?’ I was just so upset. I was so upset.”

That encounter with Henderson not only provoked her to take her kid out of Canterbury, but
it also led her to do a Google search of Henderson, after the school boasted about his hiring. An email from Headmaster Rick Kirschner mentioning Henderson’s prior run-in with the law claimed he was simply “protecting citizens” and that the matter had been “resolved.”

When she texted 16 other parents about the fact that the new head of security was a felon convicted of pistol-whipping a child, she got a cease-and-desist order from Canterbury’s lawyers.

“The fact that they hired him to protect children and his one crime he was convicted of is hurting, you know, a young adult and involving a weapon?” Coller said.

When arrested for carrying a loaded weapon, Henderson told the Lee County Sheriff’s Office that the state granted him clemency, but his certificate of clemency grants restoration of his civil rights “except the specific authority to own, possess or use firearms.”

“He should have never been in that position,” Coller said. “He should have never been hired for that position.”

WINK News has reached out to Kirschner and the school’s legal team, both to no avail. WINK has also reached out to Henderson’s family.